September Guild Meeting

A Systematic Approach to Handknitting with Cecelia Campochiaro

This talk will be about Cecelia’s personal journey through Sequence Knitting, Making Marls, and her new book Reversible Knitting. She comes to knitting from the perspective of a scientist and uses that mindset to think about stitch patterns and color, always with a focus on creating beautiful textiles. She will show a lot of examples using all three approaches, and explain how you can use these ideas in your own knitting.

Cecelia Campochiaro appeared on the knitting scene in 2015 with her debut book, Sequence Knitting. Knitting was a casual pastime until she had an ah-ha moment in 2010 and realized that interesting textured fabrics could be created by the simple repetition of a sequence of stitches. This idea evolved and led to her writing Sequence Knitting, which is a reference book about this mindful approach to knitting.

In the years since Sequence Knitting debuted, she has continued to develop new ideas in knitting. Sequence Knitting is about texture, and her second book, Making Marls, published in 2020, is about color. In Making Marls, the technique of working multiple strands together as one is explored as a way to create a wide range of visual effects. Her third book, Reversible Knitting, coming in Spring 2025, is a stitch dictionary of stitch patterns that look the same on both sides.

Cecelia lives in Silicon Valley, where for many years she developed specialized microscopes used in computer chip manufacturing. Textiles, photography and the arts have been a lifelong passion running in parallel with her technical life. In high school and college even though her main studies were in the sciences, she also studied drawing, printmaking, ceramics, and photography.

Not only is she interested in the arts and knitting, but also in books. Books have been the primary mechanism for knowledge transfer for over a thousand years. One of her missions is to honor that tradition and create books that are both informative, and also beautiful objects in and of themselves. Makers love beautiful things, and Cecelia feels strongly that books should be as lovely as tools and yarns. Today she is fully dedicated to the fiber world and “unventing” new ways to make amazing knit fabrics.