Hats and bags get more than a felting from Laura Irwin

Weekend!Life: Style

By heather larimer

The Portland Tribune, May 18, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jim Clark / Portland Tribune

Laura Irwin knits, purls, stitches and felts in her Northeast Portland apartment. Soon, she won’t be the only person knitting from her patterns.

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In many ways, Laura Irwin, the woman behind the label Precious, epitomizes the Portland fashion designer. Like many local designers, she is an East Coast transplant who became impressed by the groundswell of Portland fashion.

Irwin apprenticed with local milliner Dayna Pinkham, who is revered by Portland fashion stars. She sells her designs at Seaplane, where she also works.

But Irwin has distinguished herself from her peers in two key respects. First, her medium is atypical – Precious is all hand-knit garmets and accessories.

Second, she recently inked a deal with the book imprint Interweave to publish her designs for knitting fans nationwide.

The book will bring Precious’ designs to a much larger audience. Because hand-knitting is so labor intensive, Irwin can only produce a limited number of pieces per season. But after the book is released, home knitters will be able to reproduce Irwin’s work by following published patterns.

Irwin has a strong aesthetic and formidable craftsmanship. But she never thought that the world of knitting publications would take notice. Though her patterns had been included in knitting magazines, she felt out-of-place in the relatively conservative knitting scene.

She describes being approached with a book offer as “a complete jaw drop. I couldn’t even believe it. I didn’t think they would like my style.”

This national attention is further evidence that Portland’s unique, DIY fashion ingenuity appeals to a larger audience. Irwin’s knits are unconventional. Rather than make sweaters, she focuses on accessories. She washes the knit in a process called felting, which makes the weave denser and more stable.

Irwin explains: “If you’ve ever shrunk a sweater, then you know what felting is. You knit with the purpose of shrinking. You have to preplan mathematically.”

Once she’s got the foundation, she introduces elements that are rarely paired with knits – chains, buckles and other hardware. The end product is a compelling hybrid, both homespun and high fashion.

Irwin’s latest artistic breakthrough has been learning how to use hat forms to make more structured headwear. She learned these skills while working with Pinkham, a world-class milliner, and the results are fantastic.

Knitting just ‘took over’

While Irwin is now a very skilled knitter, inexperience didn’t deter her early efforts. In pinpointing her decision to start her own line of knitwear, she identifies the convergence of two events – the explosion of local fashion and the rise of knitting among a younger generation.

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