This was one of those ideas that seem great to start with and then take over your life. A year before shooting it I saw a cherry tree in blossom and thought ‘That would make a great knitting picture’.
Every time I’ve asked Nina Dodd to knit anything approaching camouflage she’s groaned - the random patterns make it very complicated to knit. She almost refused this concept but we settled on a child’s sleeveless dress to minimise the amount of needle time required. Even so it almost finished her off. At one point she had 24 balls of yarn on the go.
Once her work was finished I waited anxiously for the cherries to start blooming. I’d found what seemed to be the perfect tree, with a backdrop of other trees, but while all the other local cherries were overloaded with blossom, these ones were bare. I visited them every 3 or 4 days for a month and finally, as I was about to go on holiday, they started flowering. It was a lovely shoot, ably assisted by my model’s siblings and friends, all jealous of the dress and desperate for a go on the swing I’d put up.