OFF Colour Studio was formed as a community of textile designers to share knowledge of the discipline: techniques, machinery, design development, etc., and in addition to stand forward as a team with a broader palette of expertise and textile expressions.

One of the collaborative activities OFF Colour Studio presented together was a collection of textile swatches at the trade fair Premiere Vision, Villepinte Paris Nord, in the Autumn of 2015, where Marie Blicher, Anne Woidemann, and Louise Ravnløkke displayed their textile designs within knitwear, fur, and fabric manipulation.

Louise Ravnløkke presented 33 swatches for knitwear design. The collection of swatches ranged from hand knitting to grosser and finer machine knits. Designing the swatches, Louise was inspired by the Danish author Karen Blixen’s novels of cultural meeting points and the fascination of exploring foreign paths – as for example, described in the novel Out of Africa.

The swathes are designed in crisp and soft materials and colours in a harmonious palette of delicate hues and variants of black yarns to turn up the drama. In the development of the collection, Louise has experimented with knits such as tuck stitch, float effects, and knit-weaving, as a way of creating texture and patterning in the surface. In some designs, the texture and patterning are toned down and in others more expressive, giving the textile structures a three-dimensional character.

The swatches have afterwards formed the basis for further research explorations of the textile design process, the textile designer’s skills and competencies and textile means. See for example Design of Knitted Jumpers for Longevity or Memory of Textile Crafts.