MDK Field Guides No. 10: Downtown
MDK Field Guides No. 10: Downtown
Fresh, easy, relaxed—welcome to the world of Isabell Kraemer. A pair of pullovers and a set of cowls that let us play with texture and color. These are sweaters to love and to wear every day. Downtown, around town, everywhere.
In MDK Field Guide No. 10 you’ll find:
Petula Pullover: A band of geometric color makes this a very modern yoke. Knit from the top down, this sport-weight sweater works with pretty much any combination of two colors you can think up: dark with a light yoke, light with a dark yoke, subtle or wild as you wish.
Bottom Line Pullover: A simple, artful sweater in fingering weight wool. The top-down construction means you’ll get to a finished sweater with minimal finishing required.
X-Factor Cowls: Juicy corrugated goodness here, in a dimensional ribbed design that you can nest one inside the other if you’re looking for extra style and coziness. The drawstring is bonus fun.
The team at MDK say:
Isabell Kraemer is a prolific designer of sweaters and accessories who has a clear vision. Knitters recognize her work at a glance, whether it’s a pullover, cardigan, or irresistible wrappy thing.
To see an Isabell Kraemer pattern is to want it: to knit it, and to wear it. The designs that work so well for Isabell herself somehow work well for a lot of other knitters, too.
When Isabell throws a curveball in terms of shaping, proportion, color, or texture, we are open to it. Her curiosity and sense of adventure inspire us to be game for something new.
One factor is the distinctiveness of Isabell’s pattern photography and styling. In her self-published patterns, Isabell is her own model, in a light-filled space that could be anywhere but actually is in a small town in Germany. Her hair is short. Her jeans are Isabell Jeans. No muss, no fuss. Just a beautiful, relaxed vibe. We want to be there with her. Our jeans need more pockets.
But it’s more than styling. You can take Isabell out of the photos, as we did, of necessity, for this Field Guide, but she remains right there, clearly, in the designs.
As we pondered the theme for a Field Guide filled with Isabell Kraemer designs, we brainstormed all the moods her patterns evoke for us.
Cool.
Self-assured.
Open.
Urbane.
Downtown.
Isabell’s cosmopolitan designs are comfortable everywhere, doing everything. They are casual, but considered. They are garments of confidence and ease.
There's a bit of a back story to the name of these guides...
The two American women, Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne, who produce these guides run a company now known as Modern Daily Knitting, but up until a month ago the company was called Mason-Dixon Knitting. Ann and Kay were originally pen pals living in Nashville and New York respectively. They chose the name, it seems, to reflect that fact that one lived in the south and the other in the north of the USA.
I confess when I first ordered these guides in June 2020, just after they had changed the company name, I didn't realise the significance of the original name. But comments I saw online made me do a bit of homework. From Wikipedia I discovered that:
The Mason–Dixon line is a demarcation line between four U.S. states, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (part of Virginia until 1863). It was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the resolution of a border dispute involving Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in Colonial America. It later became informally known as the border between the free (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states. The Virginia portion was the northern border of the Confederacy. It came into use during the debate around the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when the boundary between slave and free states was an issue. It is still used today in the figurative sense of a line that separates the North and South politically and socially.
Having read this, I can understand the impetus for change and appreciate their choosing to act on it. My stock, however, was printed before the change took place and still carries the old company name. I have added this explanation to the website so that customers are aware of the situation.