Yarn is stubborn. Have you noticed?
I used to have certain ideas about fiber: namely, that I was the boss of it and it could be made to bend to my will. It’s just string, after all.
Yarn knows what it wants to be. Somehow it just does. And yes, some of it has to do with the structure and substance of the yarn being better-suited to one type of design over another, but it’s not just that. Yarn has a mind of its own. Your best intentions for using up stash yarn can be thwarted when you have a sit-down conversation with those few skeins you bought at X-Y-Z Fiber Festival and it stares back at you and says, “Nope.” It doesn’t give you excuses or tell you why, it just says no. Some yarn seems completely apathetic — it doesn’t care one way or the other. Cowl? Sure. Sweater? Whatevs. But not all yarn is so agreeable. Mostly the yarn in my design studio is strong-willed and determined to be the thing it wants to be, whether I like it or not.
Yarn has a mind of its own.
So when I was approached by Rachael Cook of Sherwood Yarn about a collaboration, I knew better than to get attached to an idea before I’d met the yarn. I had a few sketches penciled out, and a few hopes pinned to the back of my designer’s mind, but I didn’t commit to anything. I knew her lovely hand-dyed yarn was going to be a sweater (my yarn almost always wants to be a sweater, don’t-ya-know), but what kind of sweater remained to be seen.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been swatching, starting, stopping, swatching and starting over. This lustrous yarn knows what it wants to be, and it wasn’t going to come to life until its purpose and my vision were in alignment.
Michelangelo once said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Designing feels like that for me: there’s a beautiful story in the fiber, and I just keep knitting until I set it free. Some come to life effortlessly, some take a little more work. But eventually, I find the story and then I tell it.
I can’t wait to show you what’s coming to life on my needles. Sneak peeks coming soon….
M.
