Fabulous Knitwear Designer Faina Goberstein

Fabulous Knitwear Designer Faina Goberstein was the guest on the Yarn Thing podcast with Marly Bird, not for the first time but we are so tickled when she makes time for us to let us know what’s going on new with her.

Faina was born in Russia (lives in California now) and learned to knit about 8 from a neighbor, her mom did not knit and she did not have her grandmothers. The neighbor made socks and for a long time, Faina didn’t know there was anything else to knit, but she never stopped knitting from that tender age 8. At age 14, she discovered there was more in a magazine! While she was at university to become a math professor while still in Russia, she took a class through a magazine to increase her skills, a knitting course that included fit and couture fashion. She immigrated to the US, a small town where there was no firm she could join with her engineering skills, so she taught at University and discovered a store in Chico where she could work and teach one day a week, and also found a large variety books and yarns to work with. She says in Russia there were two kinds of yarns, worsted and fine weights so this was a totally new experience for her, but obviously she met that challenge. 

In 2008 she wrote her first book, and attended her first TNNA in 2009 where she met Marly and Simona Merchant-Dest. Faina had been working with Simona by e-mail, but had not met until that TNNA, when Faina turned around in a class and read Simona’s name tag. Simona is from the Czech Republic which is not Russia where Faina is from, but enough in common as neighbors that they work well together as we discovered when they worked on the Art of Seamless Knitting. Faina Goberstein visited with her co-author Simona Merchant-Dest about this book, which is a great source of beautiful work.

There were things that didn’t make it into that first book, Faina says they kind of overwhelmed the publisher. These pieces naturally became a NEW Book, The Art of Slip Stitch Knitting. By e-mail and visits with Skype they found inspiration in their swatches to create patterns for readers. The book also includes helpful stitch dictionary work that has not been included for the most part anywhere else, divided into helpful sections of traditional mosaic work, woven-look which uses floats in the front of your work, fancy stitches (which combines mosaic with lacy) and reversible slip stitches.

The Gobelin bag in the book was a popular topic during this visit, which is the perfect segue to Faina’s NEW Craftsy Class Slipped Stitch Colorwork: Mosaic & Beyond (that was Marly’s affiliate link). The bag was cut from the first book, which was part of a chapter on colorwork that was not included. Faina and Simona fell in love with the handles from Jul Designs, designed the bag Gobelen to complement them.  Faina designed a similar bag for her Craftsy class.

You can follow Faina Goberstein at her website: Faina’s Knitting Mode which includes her blog. She also invited us to subscribe to her newsletter there! You can also find her designer page in Ravelry, where she also has her patterns that are appearing in magazines (during the chat, a caller noticed the Bath Abbey hat from Interweave Knits Fall 2015, and Faina mentioned Spiral that appears in Knit.Purl Fall 2015). The book is available in paperback from Interweave or as an e-book. She continues to teach, in fact she will be at Vogue Knitting Live this weekend in Chicago, and has plenty of time for that since she has retired from teaching math.