Then during
Shetland Wool Week 2013 I was lucky enough to get a place at her Quotidian Colourwork
workshop. What a joyful day that was – I’ve described it here.
The idea
behind Quotidian Colourwork – and the Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook
– is that you can celebrate your everyday inspirations – your surroundings and
favourite objects – in woolly form. And, most importantly I think, Felicity
shows you how to do it for yourself.
A day or two
after that first workshop, over a delicious Nepalese curry in Lerwick (am I the
only person to find that a bit incongruous?!) Felicity revealed her ambition to
produce a book which would demonstrate a process or system for people to follow
to translate their inspirational object or image into stranded colourwork
knitting.
Fastforward a
year, via a hugely successful funding campaign and an enormous amount of hard
work and creativity, to Shetland Wool Week 2014. The first ever printed copies
of the Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook were sent hot off the press to
Felicity care of Jamieson & Smith (the Shetland Wool Brokers) and actually
arrived while I was teaching a spinning class there! Many of Felicity’s
comrades-in wool were there to share the excitement of seeing those first
copies.
There are
charts and even a few patterns you could follow to replicate Felicity’s work,
but the real purpose of the book is to give you the tools to develop your own
colour palettes and charts from the things that inspire you.
The book is
copiously illustrated with beautiful photos taken by Felicity’s brother Fergus
Ford – it is clear that he obviously understands the essence of the work – and
the pictures, rich colours and layout make it a pleasure just to leaf through
it. Felicity has also written about the objects and places, their history and
her connection to them, in a way that not only explains why she wanted to
celebrate them in knitting, but also reminds you of your own connections, and
that these are deeper than a solely aesthetic appreciation.
Most
importantly, the combination of the content and the way it is written, the
book's design and all those gorgeous photos really carries the conviction that
you too can play with yarn, colours and shapes to bring your own inspiration to
life. Choosing colours, drawing your own charts, and then knitting them, is way
too much fun!
By way of
illustration, here are a couple of projects I have underway – the Willow
Pattern pieces found on Shetland beaches – two of the details now charted
And a chart,
not yet swatched, based on the tooling on the spine of a book which has been in
my family for about a hundred years
You will see
more of these as they progress!
Buying the
book also gives you access to a pdf version which includes black & white
versions of the charts in the book and space for drawing your own charts, so
you don’t have to write on your lovely book.
 |
| this one's mine - buy your own!! |
You can order
your copy here
And while
you’re about it, I strongly recommend that you order a shade card from Jamieson
& Smith here because once the book arrives you will want to get started
straight away!
“The
questions that you and others asked me on the first blog tour (the one that
coincided with the Kickstarter campaign) really helped me to clarify my
approach to making the KNITSONIK Stranded
Colourwork Sourcebook. I thought it might be interesting to revisit a
couple here and to share how they influenced the book.
These are two questions which you asked me which were really
key to my approach to the structure and feeling of the book and I think they
are really related;
1. There is a world of difference between giving someone precise
instructions to follow to produce a more-or-less identical product (for
example, a knitting pattern which specifies yarn, needle size, number of
stitches and charts etc), and encouraging people to follow their own
inspiration to create something unique, while giving them enough guidance. Can
you say something about the balance between directing and supporting
creativity?
2. Is there something in there about learning that 'making mistakes' is
part of the creative and learning process?
One of the challenges was how to show creative process
without being overly proscriptive. The balance lies somewhere between offering
structure and maintaining openness. Rules and guidelines are really helpful and
often aid creativity because they give clear starting points; on the other
hand, you don’t want to make so many rules that people start panicking that
they are doing things wrong.
I was really aware of the need to strike this balance
between structure and freedom when writing The
KNITSONIK System, and I found it quite nerve-wracking and scary!
Just like in swatching, there were a lot of early drafts and
mistakes before the words came right. I was helped by Tom (tomofholland.com)
and Kate (katedaviesdesigns.com) and by the folks I have affectionately termed
“the book midwives” in the acknowledgements section of the book; all these
wondrous folks gave me great feedback and helped me to reflect on how to
improve the writing. Feedback is vital to creative process and having folks
read through my work and give me constructive criticism along the way was key.
I think that’s worth mentioning, because it’s also true for the swatching
process that is celebrated in the book. Showing the swatches to comrades,
getting feedback – it all helps your ideas to form along the way.
I realised that friendliness would be important, too; I
think enthusiasm and warmth go a long way towards opening up the creative
process and when you’re in a room full of people you can smile and make jokes
and play! However it’s harder to concentrate those elements into a printed
format. That’s where the talents of Nic Blackmore (http://laliloo.squarespace.com/)
and Fergus Ford (http://fergusford.com) come in; they added so much.
 |
| Nic Blackmore |
Nic really understood the project from the outset, and was
an amazing collaborator on the design side of things. We drank a lot of coffee,
laughed with her lovely dog, Maisie, and discovered a mutual appreciation for
fonts and typefaces.
 |
| Maisie and Felicity looking at proofs - Felicity is the one in the Shwook hat |
Having these wondrous things in common laid a great
foundation for our work, and a feeling of affinity. The first time I saw The
KNITSONIK System laid out on the pages, my first thought was THIS LOOKS
FRIENDLY! NIC HAS MADE IT LOOK FRIENDLY! I am not sure exactly how she has done
that, but I think it is magic.
Ferg’s great passion is wedding photography. He originally
studied theatre and though he has a lot of technical knowledge about cameras
and light, I think his background in drama comes through in the emotions he
captures in his work. I learnt a lot about getting a mood or a feeling into a
photograph from working with my brother.
For instance we had a couple of frustrating afternoons
trying to put everything on a white studio background. I wanted to show all the
things you need to have at the start of the creative swatching process –
needles, pencils, paper, yarns etc. – and was really stuck on this idea of
showing them all neatly laid out and itemised. feeling of
starting a creative project; of getting your pencils and paper and your photos,
of ordering your yarn and picking the shades from your shade-card, and Ferg
said that he felt the plain white studio background was sterilising the joy of
creativity.
He suggested instead that we lose the white background for
those shots and use my lovely old worn work table as a background surface. The
table is so much more charismatic than the plain white studio background was,
and the photos we took against the warm wood are a far richer invitation to
play and create and enjoy colour than my original idea had been; Ferg just knew
the feeling was all wrong in the
original white studio setup.
 |
| Felicity calls this photo 'messy work table - all I can say is - she hasn't seen my work table!! |
Another happy experience was when we went around my garden
picking leaves and organised them from dark green to pale yellow. I think our
excitement at finding such a rich palette right there among my plants comes
across in the final image that we got, and I remember still the energy of us
both exclaiming “that one is such a great colour next to that one” “that one is
definitely lighter” and then “let’s get all the yarn out to match!”
Experiences like these kept reminding me of your question
about whether ‘making mistakes’ would be celebrated in the book the whole time
I was working on it; I think it’s fundamental. For me the number one maxim of
all creative processes is that you have to be allowed to make a mess along the
way; to get it wrong, muddle it up, do bad things to colours and so on.
Remembering this helped me to really enjoy making the book and to savour the
process – even the bad chapters that will never see the light of day and the
photos that didn’t make it into the book... they are all part of the process.
I especially relished writing the captions for the swatch
pages in the book that deal with my own creative experiments. It felt very
liberating to put my mistakes and bad knitting into a knitting book, because it
is a way of celebrating the process of how we learn and create and because I
hope it will give other knitters courage. One of my favourite photos from the
book is the one where I am standing under my walnut tree holding the swatch
which I designed from it; I told Ferg the image needed to be really triumphant:
I want to spread the idea that we really can feel this good about knitting
swatches full of original stranded colourwork.
Thanks so much for asking me about creative process and
mistakes back in April – your questions really helped me!
