Celebrating the paintings of the Artist Dora Carrington (Bloomsbury Group) in a hand knitting piece, I use cable and colour to create a painterly knitted canvas showing the landscape and geology of Andalucia. Dora Carrington stayed in Yegen ( a remote village in the Sierra Nevada mountains Southern Spain) with the writer Gerald Brennan (The Face of Spain) and Lytton Strachey at Brennan’s house for some time in March 1920( ninety nine years ago). `She found it a ‘unique arcadia’ and had ‘seldom been so happy continuously day after day’. Her incredible painting of the mountains towards Almeria has been an all time favourite of mine. Her reading of the landscape and colour of this extraordinary part of Spain is deep, rich and evocative. I have tried to approach the design of this hat in the same way….bringing a richness to the pattern and to the colour using our own naturally dyed Saorse wool cashmere, Lalland Lambswool and the Fibre Co. Terra and Acadia yarns in their magical blends of Wool/Alpaca and Silk.

All these amazing yarns came from my stash in the studio. I wanted to create something fun and playful which folk could make and help use up their own stashes! Simply chose your own colours and label them to match our A - J code. Most of the yarns used were lightweight Aran and some DK. They blended really well together. Tension will be your own depending on what you chose to use, however my tension came up at 26sts and 22rows over the complex cable fabric pattern.

The two Colour ways reflect the different moods of the mountains and distant Mediterranean Sea.