Call for Design 💥 // Spring 2022 Collection

Dear Designers, 

We're seeking hand knitwear designs for our Spring 2022 collection. Read more below for details and download our moodboard here for further details. 

There’s still snow on the ground with melt patches of green for early spring. The snowdrops are pushing through and you can feel spring in days of mild sunshine. Heavy coats aren’t needed during the days, instead using favorite sweaters, hats, and scarves as layers against the chill.

For our Spring 2022 collection we’re focusing on the technique that sparks joy and makes us us — cables. We’re drawing inspiration from naked spring branches and exposed roots of ancient trees covered in moss for worsted to fine weight cables, textures, and openwork that evokes the spring.

The design question we always ask is “What makes me feel like me? What makes my partner, parents, and loved ones feel the same?” For this collection we’re looking for cabled, textured, colorwork, and openwork designs focusing on comfort and universal wearability. Think about lightweight cabled pullovers, circular cabled yokes, cardigans with convenient pockets, and shawls that incorporate lace + cables. We’re always looking for next great hat, cowl, or shawl with polished cast ons and seamlessly flowing rib-to-cable transitions.

Most of all, we’re interested in what inspires you looking into Spring ’22. We’re lovers of traditional knitwear refreshed for modern life, which runs from an updated-classic cabled pullover to fresh applications of stranded, intarsia, and mosaic colorwork. We love beautiful finishing work and thoughtful details like tubular cast ons and bind offs and thoughtful tailoring, and think of them as signature elements of Hudson + West designs. We believe— deeply—in clear, high quality pattern writing that helps knitters reach new horizons in their work, and place a premium on designs that provide new spins on classics of the knitter’s wardrobe, elevating classic ideas with improved techniques or approaches that make them both more knittable and more wearable.

We hope this moodboard sparks your imagination, and gives you a sense of what animates us as we look into Spring ‘22. We’re seeking a small number of size inclusive pullovers and cardigans for all people, scarves, shawls, and, of course, hats! We love a good beanie.

At Hudson + West Co., we think great yarn and great design are for everyone, and we’re committed to inclusion in all aspects of our work. We welcome designers of all races, ages, nationalities, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and sizes, and we expect our partners and collaborators to do the same (and yes, this includes pattern grading). We’re trying to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

 We can’t wait to see what you come up with for this collection!

Submissions due: Jan 12, 2022
Samples and patterns due: March 9, 2022

Please send your digital submissions to info@hudsonandwestco.com.

Please include the following in your submissions:

• Your legal name, pronouns (if desired), email, phone, mailing address, Ravelry name, and, Instagram.

• Detailed sketch

• Written description of the piece, including construction, technical and decorative details

• Digital scan of your swatch(es)

• Yarn info, including gauge and needle size(s)

Incomplete submissions, or submissions received after the due date, may not be considered.

Compensation, Rights, and Lawyery Stuff

Hudson + West Co. is committed to compensating our designers and sharing in the upside of great design. We pay a flat rate for the initial design and sample, and provide tech editing, layout, and photography (and may ask you to help a bit during preview knitting). We keep the print rights to the pattern, and we give designers 100% of all digital sales of the pattern going forward, which feels like an “everybody wins” setup to us. We’ll keep samples for a period of time after publication so that we can use them for trunk shows, but will then return them to you. We’re small and nimble and happy to work out details on a case by case basis, but Sloane practiced law for a long time, so we write paper contracts. For everything.

Thank you for supporting us!

Sloane Rosenthal + Meghan Babin

Co-Founders