It was towards the end of November, high season at We Are Knitters; orders, wool, Christmas specials… and suddenly in the middle of the controlled chaos, the telephone rings.
Ogilvy & Mather the PR agency of Iberia contacted us. And what did they want from We Are Knitters? A sweater for an Iberia airplane, of course!
But they did not want just any wool, they wanted the warmest wool on earth; and we have it 😉
They want to transmit the warm feeling that they give their clients, the warmth of all these families that come together during Christmas time – thanks to their flights.
And we did not doubt for a second, we knew it right away; we were going to use are warmest and softest wool: Merino Superwash.
We immediately took action: measurements, samples, prototypes…
After long days of of work, after a lot of prototypes, different material tests, densities and colors…
We finally achieved, thanks to our knitters, a beautiful design that everyone is happy with. Without losing another second, we began knitting.
Merino wool has to be knitted with the thinnest needles, the 5mm needles – so we really didn’t have any time to lose!
We used about 12 balls of wool to knit the sweater and it took us 120 hours to finish it.
And finally, the moment we had all been waiting for. The model airplane arrived and we made the first fitting test for our new colleague at Iberia 😉
– “It was a very ambitious project” Raquel told us, head of the design department.
– “They wanted the sweater to fit very snugly on plane but also so that it would seem like the fabric was moving in the breeze. The plane also had a lot of very irregular shapes, so we had to complete a lot of tests”
And finally… perfect! The sweater fit like a glove.
Everyone was happy and everyone loved it. Well done girls!
Now that everything fit, the measurements come out just right and the elastics fit perfectly it was time to knit the sweater with the final Christmas design 😉
And then the grand moment had come. It was time to get dressed and to go on the big screen.
– “The day of the filming, we finished at about 4 o’clock in the morning. For the last scene they asked us to take apart the sweater again so that they could simulate that in the advertisement. But that would have taken us over an hour so in the end we had to cut it in half.” says Mónica sadly, another professional knitter, at We Are Knitters.
“At the beginning I didn’t want to to, I almost started crying. Six days, day and night, without ever stopping! And then we had to cut it in half 🙁 But Raquel then told me: ‘Mónica, just think of it as a mistake’ and then I didn’t feel as bad anymore.” 🙂
We have never before knitted something that big. It was a great project.
We are more than proud to be a part of this project and, together with Iberia Spain, give warmth to people all over the world.
Here you can see the result:
