Kitty Finn – SDCA Degree Show 2026

Wish you were here!

This project explores how knitwear can translate memory, heritage, and personal storytelling into contemporary textile design. Inspired by my relationship with my grandparents, who introduced me to both painting and knitting, the work combines inherited tools, family photographs, and personal experiences to create garments that function as emotional archives.
Using photographs from my grandparents’ travels through Mexico alongside my own memories of the country I reinterpret colour, texture, and atmosphere through painting, knit sampling, and garment development. The project moves between visual research, painting, jacquard, intarsia, lace, and digital embroidery, allowing materials and processes to shape the final outcomes.
Influenced by David Hockney, Missoni, Wes Anderson, and Slim Aarons, the collection explores bold colour, simplified forms, and painterly compositions. Alongside this, the project responds to ideas of longevity and emotional durability within fashion, creating timeless knitwear designed to be worn, valued, and passed on across generations.

Final collection

Final degree show installation combining garments, embroidery developments, painted imagery, and moving image. The display presents the full creative process behind the collection, showing how photographs, paintings, sampling, and textile experimentation evolved into final knitted outcomes. The embroidered stop-motion strips and suspended knit samples reinforce the project’s focus on memory, storytelling, and process-led design.

Fourteen-colour jacquard dress knitted on Shima Seiki using viscose and merino yarns. Developed from simplified painted landscapes inspired by family photographs taken in Mexico, the garment translates colour, atmosphere, and landscape into knit through layered tonal transitions and painterly forms.

Negatives-inspired bandeau knitted on Shima Seiki using merino and cotton yarns, paired with a lace knit skirt knitted using different punchcards on the Silver Reed. The repeated checked knit structure of the top references photographic negatives, exploring themes of fragmentation, nostalgia, and memory.

Textured bandeau knitted in stretch viscose yarn on Shima Seiki paired with an embroidered knitted skirt developed from the underwater stop-motion sequence. The embroidered imagery captures movement through fragmented stitched frames, translating painted memories into textile form.

Negatives-inspired long sleeve top developed using checked knit structures and contrasting opaque and sheer areas. Paired with a lightweight lace skirt, both knitted on Shima Seiki, the outfit combines transparency, texture, and layered colour inspired by photographic film negatives and faded imagery

Intarsia knitted mini skirt developed from abstracted painted imagery of swimming underwater, paired with a delicate open-knit top. Simplified shapes and painterly colour blocking were translated into knit using intarsia and held stitch techniques, creating variation between density and transparency.

Alternative styling combining garments from across the collection to demonstrate versatility and cohesion between silhouettes, textures, and colour palettes. Despite using different knit techniques and structures, the garments maintain a consistent visual language inspired by memory, landscape, and storytelling.

An animated stop-motion sequence created from 30 individually embroidered frames taken from an underwater swimming video of my brother in Mexico. The film combines traditional handcrafted processes with digital embroidery technology, reinforcing the project’s exploration of memory, movement, and fragmented moments captured over time.