Everything You Need to Know About Cashmere Knitting Patterns — The Complete Guide

Have you ever run your fingers across a cashmere sweater and wondered — how exactly did they make that? What creates those gorgeous twisted ropes, the intricate coloured diamonds, or that impossibly cloud-like puffiness that makes you never want to take it off?

Every texture you see and feel in a cashmere piece starts with a knitting pattern. At Diamond Knitland, we’ve spent decades working with the finest cashmere fibre in the world, and we believe that understanding these patterns makes wearing them — and choosing them — a richer experience.

This is your complete guide to every major cashmere knitting patterns. Whether you’re shopping for your next luxury piece or simply curious about what goes into fine knitwear, we’re going to walk you through all of them — what they are, where they come from, and why they work so beautifully in cashmere.

Cable Knit Cashmere — The Pattern Everyone Recognises

If you’ve ever picked up a sweater covered in those thick, twisted rope-like ridges, you’ve already met cable knit. It is arguably the most iconic texture in the world of luxury knitwear — and one of the most enduring.

Cables are formed by crossing groups of stitches over each other using a cable needle, creating that signature braided or twisted effect running vertically up the fabric. The result is sculptural in the truest sense — light catches it differently from every angle, and the raised stitches create a depth and dimension that no printed or woven fabric can replicate.

In cashmere, cable knit is something else entirely. The softness of the fibre makes every twist feel luxurious rather than rigid, and because cabling produces a naturally denser fabric, cable knit cashmere sweaters offer remarkable warmth without added weight. They hold their shape beautifully with wear, making them one of the smartest long-term investments in any knitwear wardrobe.

Cable patterns range from a clean, simple 4-stitch twist to elaborate honeycomb and lattice cables that interlock across the full width of a garment. Whether it’s a single cable detail running up a sleeve or a full Aran-style composition of interlocking patterns, this is a stitch that scales with equal elegance.

Fair Isle Cashmere — Scotland’s Heritage Colourwork

Few knitting patterns carry a story as rich as Fair Isle. The tradition originates from a tiny, wind-swept island sitting between Orkney and Shetland off the north coast of Scotland, and it stepped onto the world stage in 1921 when the Prince of Wales was photographed in a Fair Isle jumper — sparking a fashion movement that, more than a century later, has never really ended.

The technique has a precise and beautiful logic: only two colours are used in any single row, with the second yarn carried along the back of the work. This produces a naturally double-layered fabric — warmer than single-colour knitting — decorated with repeating geometric motifs that have become instantly recognisable worldwide. Crosses, OXO shapes, eight-pointed stars, and the small “peerie” bands of tiny patterns that fill the spaces between the larger designs.

What makes Fair Isle cashmere so exceptional is the combination of colour precision and softness. The fineness of the fibre allows each motif to read with crisp, sharp definition while remaining impossibly gentle against the skin. At Diamond Knitland, we work Fair Isle in everything from traditional palettes — warm oatmeals, rich ochres, deep forest greens — to fresh contemporary colourways that feel completely current.

One thing worth knowing as you shop: true Fair Isle is specifically tied to those Shetland island motifs and the two-colour-per-row construction. You’ll often see the term used loosely to describe any colourwork knitting, but the authentic tradition is something genuinely distinct and worth seeking out.

Aran Knit Cashmere — Ireland’s Textural Masterpiece

If cable knit is a single instrument playing beautifully, Aran knit is the whole orchestra performing at once. Originating from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, Aran knitting takes the logic of cables and pushes it to its most elaborate, expressive, and symbolically rich extreme.

An authentic Aran garment combines multiple stitch patterns across the same piece simultaneously — cables of varying sizes, diamond panels, honeycomb sections, seed stitch backgrounds, and bobbles — all working together in a composition that feels architecturally complex and visually extraordinary. And every element carries meaning rooted in island folklore: the diamond stitch for prosperity and success, the honeycomb for the rewards of hard work and industry, the rope cable for the fishing lines that sustained the community.

Traditionally worked in the natural cream of unbleached wool, Aran sweaters were built for the harsh Atlantic weather — dense, water-resistant, and enduring. In cashmere, the entire experience is transformed. The raised stitches retain their extraordinary definition and visual drama, but the weight of the garment drops dramatically. You get all the textural richness of a traditional Aran pattern with the feather-light comfort and incomparable softness of fine cashmere. It is one of the most remarkable things we make.

Ribbed Cashmere — The Unsung Hero of Luxury Knitwear

Ribbing doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, but it is the great structural hero of knitwear. Those vertical alternating columns of knit and purl stitches — in the classic 1×1 or 2×2 configurations — create a fabric that is inherently elastic. It hugs, conforms, and springs back perfectly. It’s on every cuff, every waistband, every neckband of virtually every knitted garment ever made.

But ribbing as a full all-over pattern is where things get genuinely exciting. A fully ribbed cashmere sweater, roll-neck, or knit dress is one of the most flattering silhouettes in fashion. The vertical lines create a natural lengthening effect, the elasticity ensures the garment moves with your body rather than fighting it, and in fine cashmere, the subtle vertical texture has a beautiful quiet depth that rewards close attention.

The range of ribbing variations is wider than most people realise — 1×1 rib for fine, delicate definition; 2×2 rib for a bolder column; twisted rib, where each stitch is worked through the back loop, for a crisper geometric precision; and at the most luxurious end, fisherman’s rib and brioche, where the technique evolves into something altogether more plush and spectacular.

Lace Knit Cashmere — Where the Fibre Meets Air

Lace knitting is the most ethereal thing you can do with yarn. Rather than building solid fabric, lace leans into the spaces — using deliberate yarn-overs and carefully placed decreases to create openings that become as much a part of the design as the stitches themselves. The result is a breathable, delicate, impossibly refined fabric that feels like it belongs in an entirely different category from ordinary knitwear.

The Shetland lace tradition is the most celebrated expression of this technique in the world. At its historical finest, Shetland lace shawls were so fine and flexible they could be drawn entirely through a wedding ring — a level of craftsmanship that speaks to generations of extraordinary skill passed down through island communities.

In cashmere, lace knitting achieves something truly remarkable. The natural halo of the cashmere fibre softens the geometric edges of the openwork without blurring its precision, giving the fabric a warmth and generosity that linen or cotton lace could never replicate. Cashmere lace drapes like liquid. A lace-knit cashmere wrap or shawl is the kind of piece you reach for when you want to feel genuinely extraordinary — light enough for every season, beautiful enough for every occasion.

Intarsia Cashmere — Bold Colour Without Bulk

When a design calls for large, distinct blocks of colour — a striking geometric panel, an animal or botanical motif, a bold abstract shape — intarsia is the technique that makes it possible without adding weight or thickness to the fabric.

Unlike Fair Isle, where the second colour is stranded across the back of the work (creating that valuable extra warmth), intarsia uses separate small bobbins of yarn for each distinct colour area. The yarns are twisted together neatly at every colour boundary, producing a completely seamless single-thickness fabric with clean, graphic colour fields and no hidden bulk behind the design.

The visual impact of intarsia in cashmere is exceptional. The natural lustre of the fibre makes every colour area sing with a depth and warmth that synthetic yarns simply cannot match. Intarsia cashmere pieces tend to feel contemporary and fashion-forward — the kind of knitwear that makes a clear, confident statement without needing to shout.

Plain Cashmere Sweaters — The Purest Test of Quality

Sometimes the greatest luxury is simplicity. Stockinette stitch — the foundational fabric of alternating knit and purl rows that produces that classic smooth surface of V-shaped loops — is the most basic stitch in knitting. And in cashmere, it becomes the most revealing.

There is nothing to distract you from the yarn itself. No texture competing for attention, no colourwork filling the eye. Just that extraordinary smooth, lustrous cashmere surface catching the light. The softness, the drape, the natural sheen — every quality of the fibre is completely visible and completely exposed.

This is exactly why a beautifully made plain cashmere crewneck or V-neck in stockinette is one of the hardest garments in knitwear to get truly right. Every element of quality — the grade of the yarn, the consistency of the tension, the precision of the finishing — is entirely on show. It is the ultimate benchmark of a cashmere manufacturer’s capabilities, and the piece that every serious knitwear lover should have in their wardrobe.

Seed Stitch & Moss Stitch Cashmere — Quiet Texture, Lasting Elegance

Not every texture needs to announce itself loudly. Seed stitch and moss stitch are the quiet achievers of the knitting world — patterns that add real tactile depth and visual interest to a cashmere piece without ever overpowering it.

Both are created by alternating knit and purl stitches within each row in ways that prevent them from aligning vertically, producing an all-over pebbly, dimpled surface that sits flat and lies beautifully without curling. Seed stitch reverses the sequence every row; moss stitch holds each alternating column for two rows before switching, creating a slightly more elongated and organic texture.

What makes these stitches particularly useful is their versatility. They’re completely reversible, they don’t curl at the edges — which makes them ideal for open cardigans and scarves — and they work equally well as all-over patterns or as textural contrast panels alongside cables or plain stockinette. In cashmere, the result is a garment that rewards close attention — a piece that becomes more interesting the longer you look at it and the more you wear it.

Fisherman’s Rib & Brioche Cashmere — The Cloud Stitch

If you have ever put on a sweater and thought it felt like being wrapped in something impossibly soft and pillowy — chances are you were wearing fisherman’s rib or brioche knitting. These are the techniques that take the concept of ribbing and push it to its most generous, most luxurious, most cloud-like conclusion.

The technique works by wrapping the yarn around the needle before working each stitch into the row below rather than the current one. This seemingly small adjustment creates a dramatically different result — a doubled-up, extra-lofty fabric with a deep springiness and extraordinary warmth that makes it appear significantly thicker than it actually is. The texture is deeply satisfying: pillowy, padded, and incredibly tactile.

In cashmere, fisherman’s rib and brioche knitting are revelatory. The cloud-like structure of the stitch combined with the feather-light softness of fine cashmere creates something that is genuinely unlike any other knitwear you’ll wear. It’s the sweater you’ll reach for without thinking on every cold morning.

For those wanting something truly special, two-colour brioche takes the technique further still — alternating two different cashmere yarns across the structure to produce a reversible fabric where each side displays the opposite colour. It is technically demanding to produce and visually spectacular to wear.

Basketweave Cashmere — Geometric Warmth

Basketweave does exactly what the name promises — it recreates the look of an interlocked woven basket through alternating blocks of knit and purl stitches arranged in an orderly, repeating grid. The effect is satisfyingly geometric: a visually calm, rhythmically regular texture that catches light from multiple angles and gives any cashmere piece a quietly quilted, dimensional quality.

What’s particularly appealing about basketweave is how it achieves genuine textural richness without the technical complexity of crossing stitches in cable knitting. It is more accessible in construction while still producing a fabric with real depth and warmth. In cashmere, those alternating smooth and recessed squares have a beautiful tactile quality — the kind of texture that draws your hand to it instinctively.

Basketweave works especially beautifully in home knitwear — cashmere throws, cushion covers, and blankets — where the geometric regularity of the pattern and the exceptional warmth of the construction come together to create pieces that are as beautiful to look at as they are to use.

Chevron & Zigzag Cashmere — Knitwear With Direction

Most knitting patterns work on a vertical or horizontal logic — cables and ribs run up the garment, stripes and colourwork run across it. Chevron and zigzag patterns break that logic entirely and beautifully, introducing diagonal movement into the fabric through careful sequences of increases and decreases that ripple across the textile in continuous waves.

In a single colour, the effect is quietly architectural. The shifting angles catch light differently as you move, giving the garment a subtle dynamism and optical interest that flat, plain knitting simply can’t achieve. In stripes or multicolour cashmere, chevrons become genuinely eye-catching — contrasting colours cascade together in perfect diagonal synchrony, creating a mesmerising rhythmic flow across the whole piece.

Chevron cashmere has a graphic confidence that sits equally comfortably in classic and contemporary wardrobes. The pattern makes a clear visual statement without becoming loud or trend-dependent — and in the finest cashmere, that combination of bold design and softness is a deeply compelling one.

Argyle Cashmere — The Heritage Diamond

Argyle is one of those patterns so thoroughly embedded in the story of Western fashion that it has practically become a cultural symbol in its own right. Its roots lie in the tartan of Clan Campbell of Argyll in the Scottish Highlands, and it evolved over generations into the overlapping diamond grid we know today — worked in two or more colours, with fine diagonal lines in a contrasting shade crossing between the larger diamond shapes to complete the design.

Producing argyle correctly in cashmere demands serious technical skill. The large diamond fields are constructed using intarsia principles, while the fine crossing diagonals require their own careful solution. The finished result, when done well, is extraordinary — the natural sheen and lustre of cashmere gives each diamond an almost jewel-like luminosity, and the colours read with a clarity and richness that coarser yarns simply cannot achieve.

There is something genuinely timeless about a well-made argyle cashmere piece. It carries the whole heritage of British country dressing — long weekends, golf courses, the quiet confidence of old money aesthetics — while feeling completely at home in a modern wardrobe when handled with the right colourways. Navy and ivory. Camel and cream. Charcoal and sage green. These combinations have been working beautifully for a hundred years. They will continue to do so.

Pointelle Cashmere — Everyday Delicacy

Pointelle sits in a particularly lovely middle ground between the solidity of plain stockinette and the drama of full lace knitting. Small, regular eyelet openings are placed in deliberate repeating formations across the fabric — rows of tiny hearts, diamond arrangements, vertical columns of eyelets — creating a quietly decorative openwork effect that breathes lightness and femininity into the piece without making it feel fragile or impractical.

The eyelets in pointelle are intentionally small and controlled. This is not dramatic openwork — it is a whisper of detail, a subtle airy quality in the fabric that makes a pointelle cashmere top feel distinctly more special than a plain one, without sacrificing any of the warmth or wearability that makes cashmere such a practical everyday luxury.

Pointelle cashmere layers beautifully through every season, reads as elegant in virtually every context, and in fine cashmere, has a delicacy and refinement that makes it feel genuinely considered and crafted. It is the option for those who want a little quiet texture and femininity in their wardrobe without stepping all the way into lace territory.

Colour Block Cashmere — Cashmere as Composition

Colour block knitwear is bold by design: distinct, clean fields of colour placed in deliberate geometric relationship to one another across a garment, with hard, unblurred edges between each zone. The visual references are the colour field painters — Rothko, Mondrian, the Bauhaus school — and when colour blocking is handled with real intention, a cashmere sweater can feel like wearable fine art.

The simplest and most wearable forms use horizontal divisions — a richly coloured yoke against a neutral body, contrasting sleeves, or a bold hem in an accent shade. More complex constructions use intarsia principles to achieve vertical, diagonal, or asymmetric divisions that break the conventional geometry of a knitwear silhouette entirely. Whatever the configuration, the effect is always clean, graphic, and modern.

What gives colour block cashmere its particular power is the quality of the fibre itself. The colours in Grade A cashmere have a depth and luminosity that synthetic or standard wool cannot replicate — they don’t just sit on the surface, they seem to glow from within. A beautifully curated colour pairing in fine cashmere doesn’t just look good. It is genuinely beautiful.

Norwegian & Nordic Cashmere — Winter Heritage Knitwear

Norwegian and Nordic knitting patterns represent Scandinavia’s magnificent contribution to the global story of luxury knitwear. Technically, they share the same stranded colourwork foundation as Fair Isle — two colours per row, with the unused yarn carried across the back — but the design vocabulary is entirely and distinctly its own.

Where Fair Isle favours small, abstract, tightly repeating geometric bands, Norwegian and Nordic patterns work in bolder, more representational imagery: eight-pointed stars, reindeer and elk silhouettes, snowflakes, pine tree motifs, and most iconically, the Selbu rose — a symmetrical eight-petalled flower design that became the defining symbol of Norwegian knitwear tradition from the mid-19th century onward. Distinct national traditions like the Norwegian lusekoft and the Icelandic lopapeysa have each contributed their own aesthetic signatures to this rich and varied family of patterns.

The classic colour logic of deep navy or charcoal set against natural cream or ivory — the fundamental palette of Norwegian knitwear — is one of the most visually powerful and enduringly sophisticated combinations in all of textile design. In cashmere, these patterns take on a genuine elegance: the boldness of the traditional motifs is refined and softened by the luxury of the fibre, producing pieces that carry authentic Scandinavian heritage while feeling entirely at home in a contemporary luxury wardrobe.

Every Pattern. One Extraordinary Fibre.

Looking across all of these patterns together, what strikes us most is the sheer variety of experience that a single material can offer. From the architectural complexity of Aran to the whisper-light delicacy of pointelle. From the bold graphic confidence of colour block to the quiet, almost meditative texture of seed stitch. From the heritage storytelling of Fair Isle to the effortless modernism of chevron.

Cashmere can do all of it. And it does all of it beautifully.

That’s what makes working with this fibre — sourced from the high plateaus of Mongolia and Inner China, where the harsh winters produce the longest, finest, softest fibres in the world — so endlessly compelling for us at Diamond Knitland.

If you spotted a pattern name on one of our product listings and followed the link here to learn more, we hope this guide gave you a real sense of what you’re looking at and why it matters. And if you’re ready to explore our collections, we’d love to show you each of these patterns at their very best — in the finest cashmere we can source.

Diamond Knitland — Premium Cashmere Knitwear, Crafted with Care.