Design Weekend
Friday 15th March 2013
Design weekend is about to kick off here at Court Cottage. Millington and I are beyond excited. Yes, the salt-caramel choc brownies are cooling…!
We are also very excited about welcoming six potential designers to the event. We ran a design day last year and good though it was, it was clear that one day is only enough for a taster of what it really is to design something yourself. By 2PM, I don’t want to be seeing: ‘OMG only 2 hours left and I’m still swatching…’ kind of anxiety on faces.
So this time it’s two full days and only six students admitted.
In preparing for the weekend, but also just in general because it’s on my mind all the time, I think about: what is design? I’m limiting this to knitting design.
I guess for most of us it comes from seeing something really inspiring and then wishing to somehow create an essence of that thing in your knitting. It may also spring from wanting an item and not being able to either buy it or find a pattern.
This sort of designing is self-starting and possibly the most satisfying. It is the reason I started designing, for example, I wanted a hand-knitted knitting bag and I didn’t want to sew it, so I used a sewing pattern idea and the Shibori knitted felt bump-bag was the end result. This led me on an amazing design journey, because design is also organic and one idea leads to another.
Need or desire is also the reason I design so many shrugs. I wanted a shrug that was also a scarf and having knitted one, I got used to wearing shrugs and I wanted more so I had to make them.
Another route to design is the commissioned item, and I’ve done a fair few of these in my time. I really love these, because someone else starts the framing process and it’s an amazing discipline. For example, a retailer may dictate the item, the yarns and maybe other parameters such as degree of difficulty, length of knitting time, and use of other materials. This is a bit like the knitting version of the game where you’re given a bag of random ingredients and have to create a meal. Your job then is to think alongside the commissioner – and to add your own stamp, to focus on what is possible and to deliver a pattern that meets all their needs. To do this, you have to think more about who the commissioner is aiming it at, for example, his or her customers in a yarn shop; or magazine readers.
Here at Court Cottage this weekend, my students have free-reign albeit that my area of design expertise, such as it is, is more in the accessory field. Some weeks ago, I asked them to begin gathering and ordering their design ideas and thoughts; to begin collecting inspiring images, fabrics and items; and to start letting their minds wander about in the area of our brains that life, work, routine and lack of use can leave stale or unsure of itself.
Is there a designer in all of us? I really think there is. My mind, should you be able to inhabit it, is not going to be like yours. I’d like, for example, to inhabit the mind of someone really logical and with great spacial awareness, just to see if that feels as nice as I think it must be. If that’s you, you can occupy my mind for a day in return, deal? – it’s madness in here, so while you’re being me for a day, could you also have a sort-out and a tidy-ooop? Thanks. But whatever our mind-set, I believe
everyone has creativity of one sort or another. Finding it, should you want to, is mostly about being allowed to – being given permission to experiment,
try things – perhaps most importantly of all, to make mistakes.
I also think that this does not have be
The Big Thing. To add design to your knitting, you don’t need to design a mahoosive garment-project. You know, awesome if you do, but I am just as content with someone tinkering with a design that someone else may have designed but which the knitter thinks will look better on her if she adds cuffs, or changes some things. I have seen lots of my designs that have been ‘re-designed’ by the knitters – and I love that. Moebius day is a great example, images of Moebiuses that are not like the one I taught them to knit are coming in to me now (I am like a Moebius-plague-carrier. Also, I told you my mind was an odd place).
That is design, just as surely as designing an intarsia dressing gown using 37 balls of Yak-Down is design (my latest project, the Giant Yak-Down Dressing Gown, betcha can’t wait for that one, can you?).
I can’t redesign the new cardigan with an extra sleeve – (sends up fervent prayer that this isn’t the concept on the minds of any of my students this weekend…) If I need a glove it’s still going to have to go over my hand. I may even need two… Socks still need heels. The designing of the basic wardrobe, driven largely by the inlets and peninsulas of the human body, is done.
What’s left is the exciting part. Making it different in terms of texture, handle, shade, embellishment. That and swatching, swatching, swatching…! Team-swatching starts at 10.00 tomorrow and I anticipate that six students will reel out of the door on Sunday afternoon, clutching a bag of yarn and a hand-written pattern, wondering where the last 48 hours went. It’ll be hectic, tiring but most of all, creative fun.
Let’s see how this goes but if it goes well, next year I am thinking of running a weekend in which I ‘commission’ the designs for the participants, which would be a new experience again.
Let me know if you might be interested.
Squeeeeee! Can’t wait!!! And yes, you know I’m going to be interested in next year’s event 😉 xxx
Ha! can’t wait to see you tomorrow XXX
I want to come! xx
I wish you were! XX