This month’s Maker Spotlight is Jennifer Lee McLarty (you may know her as Jennifer Beale), a knitwear designer based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Before she picked up design full time, Jennifer was an atmospheric scientist with a PhD in the field, but now she's known for the patterns she's created using stranded colorwork, lace, and inventive constructions, with pattern names that read like a tour of the province she calls home. We’re so delighted to share her story.
So many of your patterns are named after places all across Newfoundland and Labrador - from Twillingate to Rigolet to Signal Hill and more. Do the places inspire the patterns, or is there another connection between them?
It's the cliche of "home is where the heart is" that influences all of my designs. I'm not originally from here, but I've lived most of my adult life here and right now have no plans to leave. The inspiration in most of my designs tends to be formed by a bit of a feedback loop, but the thing that originally instigates the design differs in each design. Sometimes it's the feeling in which a placename evokes in me, sometimes it's the literal meaning of a placename, sometimes it's a memory of a place I've been to, sometimes it's a photo of a place, or sometimes it's the history or landmark of a place. But then sometimes the inspiration switches, where I'll have an idea and then I'll search for a name that fits with the design idea, and then in turn the name will influence aspects of the design.
The two designs that are fundamentally my whole heart, and that are extremely sentimental to me are Heart's Content and Exploits Valley. Heart's Content was the very first sweater I ever designed. My son means the world to me. As he gets older, I need to be mindful of his privacy, but I started designing because of him and that sweater is named after the reason why. The Exploits Valley shawl is another design because of him and it got me through the hardest time of my life. It's hard keeping the meaning behind these designs private since the reason is intrinsic to why I started designing and what inspired them, but when he's an adult and gives me permission, then I'll probably write about them publicly in the future.
For Twillingate, that pattern started when Moeke Yarn (no longer operating) asked if I could do a design to celebrate the 5th anniversary of EYLUL yarns shop in Japan. The name made me think of weaving and twining, like vines mingling together. So I made a mingling vine-like stitch pattern go up in a line to each shoulder ... like a gateway.
Rigolet was such a super fun one! And it just strangely came together like magic. What set that one off was how those specific colors by Carol Sunday looked together. I picked a bunch of colors that I thought would look gorgeous together and swatched until it looked like The One. The swatch had a feel to it, like it had an Italian opera vibe. The name Rigolet also makes me think of an Italian opera. And it turns out that there is one, called Rigoletto! I don't know whether I knew of Rigoletto subconsciously or if I had heard about it in the past and forgotten, but the name was just so fitting. So upon reading about the place Rigolet, I learned that it is home to the longest boardwalk in North America ...9 kilometers long! That boardwalk inspired the construction of the sweater.
Signal Hill is arguably the top landmark in St. John's and it's been called "The Birthplace of Modern Communications". In 1901, the first transoceanic wireless message, “S” in Morse code, was received atop Signal Hill in St. John’s (though the name Signal Hill is not because of this message but rather because of its importance in warning ships of hazards). So because of this Morse code history, I wanted dot-like colorwork travelling the sleeves with a stormy feeling lace in between each signal line. And, "S" in Morse code is 3 dots so each sleeve has 3 lines of dots. Then the main color; since Signal Hill is many times perpetually embedded in fog the main color had to be light grey!
Stepaside came about purely because of what the name implies: "step aside" -- each side is literally and figuratively a step, but I'll write more about Stepaide further below!
And then the recent Great Brehat sweater started when I stumbled upon two colors by Midknit Cravings Yarn and then seeing what names that Midknit Cravings gave them...Love Letter and Inkwell! It was such a coincidence that those two colors caught my eye and then after the fact, seeing their names, I just felt so inspired to make a sweater that had an ink-spilled-on-a-love-letter type of vibe. But then I wanted to find a name for the design before proceeding with the actual colorwork. I discovered that the name Great Brehat (pronounced like Great Bra-ha) is thought to have been named after the archipelago, Île-de-Bréhat, off the coast of France, so I made vine flowers in the lower body to look like little archipelagos.
Like all things that turn out good, ideas are just stumbled upon. I set an intention and then see what happens. The best things, the things that stick, aren't forced and they just seem to work out naturally with no expectations. I could write about so many. Not all of my designs have a ton of meaning behind them, but quite a few do and those are the ones that had strong intention behind them in the first place when developing them.... I really should start writing blog posts about them!
Before you became a knitwear designer, you worked as an atmospheric scientist, with a special place in your heart for fog and atmospheric physics. Do you think that a scientific mindset shapes how you approach your design work - the way you work out a construction problem, or develop a colorwork motif?
I really don't know! But at the same time, my past must have influence in some way. I just do things that feel right. Not very scientific of me :)
I've always been science and math oriented, but I've never had the traditional scientific mindset. I'm not methodical or organized, and I like ideas and their development to be spontaneous and unplanned, yet fully intentional. For my BSc, I took 6 years and did loads of astrophysics, physics, math, and ocean physics, then later in my MSc and PhD I focused on ocean and atmospheric physics, but I think I have always had a problem with not being scientifically rigorous enough. I was more obsessed with the unknown than the known, and sticking to rules based methods was so hard to do! So I've lacked a traditional scientific mindset but I will forever have a love of physics and math... and will never get rid of my old textbooks no matter how outdated they get. Maybe it's that love that has influenced a certain geometric feel, and strangeness or structure to, many of my past designs. Like point-set topology and statistical mechanics, I loved those classes, and those classes have somehow influenced my designs in some obscure way, just don't ask me how exactly!
Late 2025 threw you a real curveball: bilateral elbow tendonitis that stopped you from working cables, purling, and some of what had been your signature design elements. Your recovery process means you'll be incorporating more colorwork and lace into your designs so that your elbows can focus on healing. Has this unexpected detour unlocked anything design-wise that you might not have explored otherwise?
Yes, the bilateral elbow tendonitis ... that was an epic curveball! And my life lesson from that is: don't knit a heavy cabled blanket when you're not really used to it and then go camping and sleep on a really hard surface on your elbows! The grand combination of those two things really did them in, and did them in super suddenly. They were in such bad shape that I couldn't knit for a while, or type on the keyboard and write up patterns, or pick up and my son in a big bear hug. I could barely function doing daily things...barely even pick up a pencil let alone pick up my mug. When the tendonitis was at its absolute worst, I felt like I was about to lose my purpose and passion (outside of being a mom!). I found an excellent physiotherapist and worked through it. I can tell I still have problems when I work on very specific things, so it seems that it will be quite a long term recovery, if ever a full one.
There's always a bright side! When I started physio, I learned that I could still knit! But I could knit only very specific things, and build up strength from those specific things in small knitting sessions. I could only knit loose gauge stockinette using light, smooth, and non-sticky yarn, like fingering weight merino. It's the only thing that didn't hurt. It made me fall in love all over again with just pure knitting. Suddenly I loved knitting plain stockinette again, rounds and rounds of it, and even more so with mesmerizing speckles and variegation. I think this love is going to stick around for quite a while. Though it's been intimidating trying to attract knitters since it's a bit of departure from what I used to focus on in designing (extra intimidating since the Instagram algorithm is the worst it's ever been and making my posts literally invisible -- and I know you all can relate!). Many of my past designs were developed with "sticky" yarns, small gauges with fairly tight fabric, and used many elbow-intensive methods. I'm not sure if I'll ever get back to being able to regularly do those types of designs again. Every time I try to knit with stickier yarn again, I start feeling a hint of pain. On the other hand, it doesn't matter if I will be able to regularly design them again, since I'm really happy and in love with what I'm doing now.
And shameless plug, I'm lucky to have finished a massive project, called L'Anse au Clair, just before the tendonitis ever started. The pattern is coming out July 23/24 to celebrate my 8 years of independent design and also to kick off the Landed: Volume 2 collection. As much as I'd love to see you knit it, if you have tendonitis, you should not attempt it, but I hope that you do make it if you love epic colorwork.
The pocket construction for your Stepaside sweater - knit sideways, then joined to the body with a three-needle bind-off - became the thread connecting an entire collection of very different sweaters. Where did that idea come from, and did you know when you designed the first Stepaside that it would inspire so many more?
Stepaside had a mind of its own. It just happened and I thank the universe for popping it into my head out of the blue. After designing and publishing it, I didn't give any thought to making other versions or renditions of it until a number of knitters started asking how they could modify it into a cardigan. And I tucked it away in my head, to one day make a cardigan using the construction. In late 2021, I had this urge to design my first one-color sweater and thought "oh it could have Stepaside-like-construction-and-pockets"! That sweater -- a cardigan -- is called Trepassey. It's a totally different sweater than Stepaside, but uses the same principle that is the backbone to the Stepaside construction. And then Ivanhoe followed, and then Trinity, then Weybridge, and finally last year was Botwood. There are still 5 more Stepaside ideas that I really want to do in the future .... I do what I say and say what I mean, so I will do them!!!
