By: KDD November 20, 2020November 20, 2020 birds, design, Kate Davies Designs10 Years in the making, birds, club, colourwork, design, inspiration, knitting, steeks, Sterntaucher21 Comments

Sterntaucher

Designing hand-knit garments (and clear instructions for others to follow) can involve a lot of compromising, a lot of accepting that, for a multitude of reasons the finished thing won’t turn out quite as you initially envisaged. But sometimes you design something that looks and feels exactly as you expected. This design started with a…

By: KDD November 17, 2020November 17, 2020 walkingcanvas, clothing, gear, landscape, outdoors, rain, textiles, trakke, walking, waxed canvas, weather36 Comments

wax and water

Simply because of where we live, this year has, I think, not been tough as it has proved for so many other people. I feel enormously grateful to be able to just step outside and go for a walk in wonderful rural scenery directly from our front door. And for me personally, the importance of…

By: KDD November 1, 2020November 1, 2020 art, musicart, collaboration, intabulation, Inviolata, Jacob Heringman, Josquin des Prez, lute, lutenist, music, photography, Susanna Pell24 Comments

In conversation with Jacob Heringman

Hello everyone, it’s Tom here. Today, I’d like to tell you about my collaboration with talented lutenist Jacob Heringman and how one of my “waterscape” images came to be on the cover of his new album Inviolata. An interesting development in contemporary photography has been the use of abstraction to distill a scene down to…

By: KDD October 29, 2020October 29, 2020 design, Kate Davies, Kate Davies Designs, knitting, publishing, textiles, YOKES!business, design, publishing, sweaters, yoke sweaters, yokes23 Comments

a whole lot of yokes

We’ve been waiting for the new edition of YOKES to arrive from our printer, and I thought I’d go back through my records and check exactly how many copies we’d sold, in total, since the book was first published in December, 2014. I discovered that the total number of YOKES we’ve printed and sold is…

By: KDD October 23, 2020October 23, 2020 textiles10 Years in the making, club, colourwork, designing, knitting, yoke23 Comments

planning / spontaneity

I’ve found that perhaps the most difficult thing about the experience of the past few months has been having to change our business plans – often at incredibly short notice. Like all businesses, we’ve found ourselves continually having to alter our arrangements in response to circumstances, guidelines and restrictions that are continually changing. Our position…

a chat with Misa Hay

There is no getting away from the fact that, whatever business you are in, this year has been a very weird one. Having to change the nature and direction of what you are doing – often very rapidly – is never an easy thing, and this year there have been so many of those changes.…

By: KDD October 9, 2020October 9, 2020 craft, Kate Davies, knitting, making, People MAKE Glasgow, photography, textilesbag, Clydesdales, craft, Glasgow, handbag, leather, leatherwork, making, McRostie15 Comments

my McRostie forever bag

Today we released the Evendoon Cardigan – the third pattern in our 10 Years in the Making Club (come and join us for three months of knitting fun!) I really enjoyed styling this cardigan with my beautiful Mull Bag, which was made for me a wee while ago by Colin Campbell of McRostie: one of…

By: KDD October 6, 2020October 6, 2020 landscape, seasonal, writingAutumn, bipolar, depression, mental health, SAD, seasonal affective disorder, winter, writing51 Comments

working through winter

It is that time of year in Scotland when the clocks are about to “go back” (when our time reverts to GMT, rather than BST). My bipolar has always had seasonal triggers (generally in very early spring, and then following the autumn equinox) and for me, as for so many other people, this time of…

shop

The KDD online shop stocks our yarn, knitting kits, books, and knitwear (socks, snoods, and jumpers, made right here in Scotland) You can purchase Kate’s hand-knitting patterns as digital PDF downloads through the KDD shop or Ravelry Tom’s photographic work is available to purchase as high-quality archival prints To date, we have published seventeen books under…

about KDD

Kate Davies Designs (KDD) was established by Kate Davies in 2010, when a stroke at the age of 36 ended her career as a literary academic. While learning to live with the effects of her stroke, Kate supported herself by designing digital patterns for hand-knitting, established an independent publishing company, and began to produce books…

tutorials

Ester A tutorial to make the 5-stitch star motif that features on the Ester hat. Inside and Outside the Red Box. A Bold Beginner Knits Tutorial for the Footfall shawl Triangular shawl construction. A Bold Beginner Knits Tutorial for the Footfall shawl “Join body and sleeves into yoke” A Bold Beginner Knits tutorialfor the Upstream…

Sterntaucher

By: KDD November 20, 2020November 20, 2020

birds, design, Kate Davies Designs10 Years in the making, birds, club, colourwork, design, inspiration, knitting, steeks, Sterntaucher21 Comments

wax and water

By: KDD November 17, 2020November 17, 2020

walkingcanvas, clothing, gear, landscape, outdoors, rain, textiles, trakke, walking, waxed canvas, weather36 Comments

In conversation with Jacob Heringman

By: KDD November 1, 2020November 1, 2020

art, musicart, collaboration, intabulation, Inviolata, Jacob Heringman, Josquin des Prez, lute, lutenist, music, photography, Susanna Pell24 Comments

a whole lot of yokes

By: KDD October 29, 2020October 29, 2020

design, Kate Davies, Kate Davies Designs, knitting, publishing, textiles, YOKES!business, design, publishing, sweaters, yoke sweaters, yokes23 Comments

planning / spontaneity

By: KDD October 23, 2020October 23, 2020

textiles10 Years in the making, club, colourwork, designing, knitting, yoke23 Comments

a chat with Misa Hay

my McRostie forever bag

By: KDD October 9, 2020October 9, 2020

craft, Kate Davies, knitting, making, People MAKE Glasgow, photography, textilesbag, Clydesdales, craft, Glasgow, handbag, leather, leatherwork, making, McRostie15 Comments

working through winter

By: KDD October 6, 2020October 6, 2020

landscape, seasonal, writingAutumn, bipolar, depression, mental health, SAD, seasonal affective disorder, winter, writing51 Comments

Glasgow’s atelier economy: then and now

By: KDD September 28, 2020September 28, 2020

History, making, People MAKE Glasgow, photography, Politics, writingbook, Glasgow, History, People MAKE Glasgow, photography, Politics, publishing, slavery, writing8 Comments

Today I thought I’d share with you the introductory words I wrote for People MAKE Glasgow . For me – a former eighteenth-century specialist – the connections between Glasgow’s eighteenth-century past and its twenty-first century present have always been apparent, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to write about those connections here. People MAKE…

congratulations, Megan and Nathan!

By: KDD September 27, 2020September 27, 2020

landscape, photography, Scotlandcarbeth, Carbeth loch, congratulations, photography18 Comments

We’ve had some beautiful, golden September weather here recently, and have been making the most of it for our 10 Years in the Making photoshoots. Due to local Covid restrictions, these shoots involve just Tom and myself, but this also means we can get up and start taking photos at first light, when there’s often…

one week to go!

By: KDD September 18, 2020September 18, 2020

creativity, design, knitting10 Years in the making, club, clubs, creativity, design, knitting13 Comments

Well, there’s just one week to go until the start of our 10 Years in the Making Club, and we are all geared up and ready for three months of knitting fun! This is the fifth club we’ve run at KDD, and each one has been a little different. Our first – the Seven Skeins…

People MAKE Glasgow

By: KDD September 11, 2020September 11, 2020

People MAKE Glasgowcreativity, making, manufacturing, People MAKE Glasgow, publishing9 Comments

Hurrah! It is People MAKE Glasgow launch day! As well as introducing you to what the book’s about, in this wee film you see one of the Glasgow makers featured in it – talented signwriter Rachel E Millar – creating the book’s cover art on one of the interior walls of the KDD warehouse. In…