For a long time I have been wanting to use one of our existing designs for shadow knitting (sometimes called illusion knitting). I finally got round to it!

The first photo shows what you see when you look at the piece at an angle; the second photo shows what you see when you look straight at it.

I decided to use my all-time favourite design - From Square to Eternity - which is really a rather strange choice. The reason I love this design, when knitting ‘normally’ is that the number of stitches is always decreasing so it seems to grow very quickly. This isn’t true of shadow knitting as it is just a straight piece of knitting with the same number of stitches on every row.

I toyed with several ideas. I wanted to represent something that was there but not really there. I looked at hypercubes but they consist of nothing but lines so wouldn’t work very well. I thought of using the infinity symbol but thought people would think it was a stretched 8.

We always refer to Square to Eternity as an infinity design because it can carry on in the same way as far as you want it to go. For that reason it seemed a good choice. The big blocks of make the shadowing particularly effective.

You will come across the phrase From Square to Eternity very often in our work. It is the title of many of our talks and workshops (although the talks and workshops do not always take the same form.) It has become a catch-phrase which reflects our basic principles of starting with something simple and then pushing the boundaries in a variety of directions.