Florence Spurling

Florence Spurling is a textile designer who specialises in knitted, crocheted and embellished fabrications. Originally from Oxfordshire, England, she trained in London where she received a Masters in Textile Design from The Royal College of Art. Florence is passionate about creating unique, tactile and desirable fabrics that display her love of detail and craftsmanship. She creates designs for the contemporary hand knitter that mix colour, texture and pattern in distinctive ways. When not designing under her own name, Florence works on fashion knitwear development for clients such as Anthropologie, Chloe, Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors. Florence is the author of Designing Knitted Textiles: Machine Knitting for Fashion, Laurence King Publishing, 2021.

Florence and I met at my first Vogue Knitting Live in January 2018 where she was exhibiting a collection of gorgeous crochet jewellery pieces. I was immediately taken by her stunning and unique creations.

Over the years, we kept in touch, making plans for a collaboration combining her creativity and our yarns in a design. I occasionally test-knitted one of her designs. One of them was the lovely Winslow Tee published in May 2022, which I love and wear very much.
In 2023, Florence agreed to fashion a shawl design for our Summer Yarn Tasting Club. She designed the beautiful Adelia Shawl in the three weights of our signature yarn, On Stage, followed by the Adelia Tee in March 2024.
In 2025, she is joing us to teach at our Retreat "NL's Gourmet-Knitting Retreat 2025 - Fine Art Knitting".
7 sense-ible questions for Florence

1) What are your favourite views, sights or reads such as books, movies or others?
The early morning light, an inspiring exhibition at the V&A, anything written by John Boyne.

2) What are your favourite feels/things to touch?
Handknits (of course!), warm sun on my back, cool linen sheets in summer.

3) What puts your life in balance?
The simple rhythm of making, time spent in nature, a cup of coffee that’s still hot, sipped without rush.

4) Favourite odours/smells/perfumes?
My baby daughter after eating strawberries.

5) Favourite tastes/flavours/food?
Perfectly ripe figs, sushi, dark chocolate with sea salt.

6) Favourite sounds such as music or others?
My little one’s giggle!

7) Favourite quote?
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." — W.B. Yeats