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A few years  before this I had an operation on my hand and had to stop knitting and crocheting for a few months. While the hand was recovering I had to find something else to do and started making fabric prints. I was particularly attracted to the design that is known in patchwork as ‘attic windows’. I experimented with permutations and placement of colours. We still have some of them hanging in the house. Fabric prints are much quicker than knitting but I eventually decided to create a knitted version.

The design combines some of our favourite things. It is an optical illusion and it uses 45-degree shaping. The illusion is created in two ways. Firstly, the colours give the effect of shading around a window. Secondly, the ‘windows’ are of different sizes to give an impression of perspective. The design creates various illusions when looked at from different angles. It may look like boxes going away from you, square tubes you can see right through, pyramids or other unexpected shapes. What you see may depend on where you stand, and the colours you use.

It also combines knitting techniques. The ‘windows’ are a type of ‘mitred square’. It was important to be able to make very small variations in the size of the windows and that they could be made to any size so that they would all look the same, regardless of which side was used as the right side of the knitting. The centre line had to look the same from both sides. A bit of experimentation gave a good method of doing this. The frame, on two sides of each square, was made in the same way we had used in so many other designs.

The design is infinitely variable. The pattern includes several variations, including joining the squares in a much more random arrangement. It has become one of our most popular patterns but the majority of knitters use it in exactly the way it is written, perhaps adding a few more squares at the outer edges to make it bigger.

The name comes from a quotation from Albert Einstein:


The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

A NEW ANGLE