After suspending at the beginning of January 2021, I am back and pretty much on the same path. I am no longer employed, so I am taking this plan to design patterns forward as a business. As discussed at length in my CERP & business plan, it is very much a lifestyle business – I am not expecting to make a lot of money from it. Further to my learning about authenticity and what that means to me, my focus is on my own fulfilment, mental wellbeing, enjoyment and how I want to spend my time, as well as passing on the joy and mental wellbeing benefits of knitting to others.
As such, in addition to designing patterns which will be a very solitary endeavour, I am now including dyeing yarns and selling them at yarn festivals (and online). This will enable me to get out and meet like minded people, chat about my ethos and get me out of the house as well as being an excellent marketing space to sell my yarns and patterns and get known.
Ducky Darlings Yarns Stand at Yarndale 2021
It will also help with my exhibition as I plan to create a complete stand set up for attending yarn festivals with racks of yarns, knitted samples, original pattern designs and branded signage. I may be creating a lot of work for myself and being a bit ambitious by including set design, but I want to be in a position to pack up my graduate show exhibition and take it to one of the yarn festivals and get on with it!
I think there has been concern that my plans aren’t ambitious enough, but there is a lot of research that needs to go into the yarns, patterns and set design.
Yarns: colour theory, colour trends, colour in relation to mental wellbeing and health and added value/personalisation. Offering something different.
Patterns: flow, rhythms and repetitions, complexity, focus, what will make it obviously a design of mine.
Set design: what makes customers come to look at my stand over others? what makes me stand out from the crowd? Practicality, branding, safety, durability all need to be considered.
I have had a contradictory first term of year 3. On one hand, I have benefitted from working from home – I save 2 hours a day commute, I haven’t really made any connections with other students on the course so I don’t feel I have missed out on much in the way of connecting with my peers. The work I have been focussing on doesn’t require access to workshops – I have far more equipment and materials here than there are there. Ingrid especially has made Teams tutorials and seminars fun and interesting and I don’t feel the teaching from any of the tutors has been negatively impacted by being online. It has been well organised and everyone has been included and participating, I love the ability to raise a virtual hand to ask questions as I often don’t feel comfortable interrupting. I think my motivation is just as high at home as it would have been had this been a ‘normal’ year.
On the other hand, I have missed the creative input of seeing what everyone else is doing – not necessarily just in Maker but across the whole of CSAD. It’s hard to see what the rest of the group are doing via video – much easier when wandering around the studio spaces. I would also probably have made more of an effort to arrange an induction on the knitting machines and spent more time working with clay had I felt comfortable being on campus – I know the safety measures are in place, but with Dad being so vulnerable it was a risk I was not prepared to take. I do intend to persevere with ceramics in my own time after uni – I enjoyed playing with clay far too much to let it go, so the group seminars were a joy and I learned so much that I will take forward.
I feel that there have been a lot of opportunities that I haven’t been able to take full advantage of due to my current situation and time restraints – work, parents, medication issues, which is frustrating. I would have loved to attend more of the online events that we were notified of, but time hasn’t allowed. I do think all the tutors have done a wonderful job of bringing these opportunities to our attention.
Overall I feel confident that I know what I am going to do, how I am going to do it and can’t wait to get stuck in once my dissertation is finished!
I am really pleased with this pattern – it satisfied everything I wanted it to and was a pleasure to work on. I guess the actual artefact is the pattern rather than the cowl/snood, so it’s quite hard to evaluate as I would need feedback from purchasers as to how simple it is to follow.
I am relatively happy with the photos, however I would ideally have another photo of my husband wearing it out in the Welsh Landscape to highlight the cultural and heritage inspiration. Time and weather did not permit. I believe that the most important thing with photographing work for patterns is to make sure the work is finished properly and looking its best. Blocking (washing and pinning out to dry, making the stitches look perfectly even and defined) is far more important than the model wearing it. I could have asked a slimmer, prettier, younger friend to model, but it would go against my ethics of inclusivity. On that note, I do think I missed a trick by not getting the photo of Peter wearing it – I think the gender neutrality of the pattern is something that should have been focussed on more.
Dee Hardwicke is a local Monmouthshire artist, illustrator, designer and knitter who designs patterns for Rowan (the most well known high quality yarn producer) as well as running workshops and various other sidelines
Stephen West is probably the most popular designer around right now – so many of his patterns are in the Ravelry top 20! Westknits designs are gender neutral, often make use of variegated yarns, which are very popular as they come in beautiful colourways – the kind of thing you pick up and ‘have to have’ no matter the cost or the fact you have no idea what you’re going to do with it! And variegated yarns don’t lend themselves to a lot of patterns – they hide lace and cable patterns, it’s hard to match with a solid colour as you need a good contrast against ALL the colours in a yarn to make it stand out…so he’s found a gap in the market there!
Kaffe Fassett is probably one of the best known Knitting pattern designers around, famed for his use of bold colour and geometric patterns (especially in the 1980’s, but is becoming popular again!)
The brief for the second artefact is to make an artefact informed by the bowl project but moving into my intended professional practice and indicative of the work I intend for the final show.
Working backwards, after Uni I intend to design knit and crochet patterns which I will sell on Ravelry, a globally accessible online forum specifically for yarn crafts.
Why?
It fulfils my desire to earn a living doing something I love – I get to be creative when designing, get the pleasure of making my prototypes/model pieces and don’t have to suffer the repeated making of the same thing over and over if I chose the path of making and selling finished items.
By selling designs online, there is no outlay other than what I spend on yarn making the prototypes/models, which I would spend anyway as I would be knitting up other peoples designs as a hobby!
It’s an income for life – even after retirement! I made some patterns available for purchase on Ravelry about 6 years ago and the sales have remained pretty consistent – I make £20-£30 per month from designs which I sell for £4 each. Of 21 patterns I sell, maybe 3 or 4 have been relatively popular. Whilst I clearly can’t live on this, the more popular patterns I design and sell, the more income I make. I also worked out that over that period, one of my designs has earned me over £1,000. Considering it took me maybe 2 weeks to design, knit up and create the pattern, when compared with what I could charge for a piece of work in a craft shop that would take me the same amount of time to make, it’s not a bad profit!
It’s relatively ethical and sustainable – as it’s all digital I am not producing anything that can cause harm to the planet…except for the energy consumption of my computer and my customers computer when they download the pattern and a few sheets of paper and some printer ink if they choose to print the pattern, but that is up to them – it isn’t necesary to print them.
It opens the doorway for so many other things – online tutorials, designing for big companies, dyeing my own yarns to go with the patterns and sell at yarn festivals such as Wonderwool Wales, Yarndale, Unravel etc…(also Marketing strategy to get my name and brand out there), incorporating my love of ceramics by making yarn bowls, shawl pins, beads and other knitting accessories.
I think my reasons unintentionally cover EDGE very well!
A little about Ravelry:
Ravelry is an incredibly diverse and inclusive community with millions of users from novice to expert, crafters and designers, big companies and independents, all ages, genders, sexualities, religions, political stances etc… welcome.
My existing designs:
What will make my patterns different from the 1.01 million patterns available on the site is that instead of the finished product I will be focussing on the making – designing based on patterns and colours with mindfulness, grounding and achieving a state of ‘flow’. Obviously the finished product will still need to be desirable – that is what people look for initially, but there are so many patterns out there that look lovely but are hell to make! I want to focus on passing on the joy of making, the finished object being a bonus!
Plans for next year:
There are several factors I believe affect the enjoyment of knitting and crocheting: colour, yarn quality, texture and drape, expense/affordability, size of project & length of time it will take to complete, complexity of pattern, adaptability/opportunity for customisation – we all want to make something original.
I can design patterns in most knitting techniques: colourwork, lace, modular, cables, texture stitches, garments, 3D objects etc… as well as crochet, and think all have the potential to meet these criteria and possibly satisfy different needs.
I intend to spend some time looking into this in more detail next year, however for the second artefact, I will go with what I know from personal experience: I enjoy patterns that will take me a maximum of 1 week to complete, that require some concentration but that are simple enough that you can watch tv or chat to people while you work. I like to work with natural , good quality, soft fibres as I suffer with dry skin on my hands. Colour is very important to me and whether it’s colourwork (using more that one colour yarn) or knitting with a single variegated yarn and watching the colours change, I need variation in colour.
Second Artefact:
I will create a design based on Welsh Blanket patterns from my visit to the National Wool Museum – in addition to my desire to look into my heritage and culture, the patterns lend themselves to simple to remember pattern repeats and therefore any small project such as scarves/cowls, mittens, cushions etc… Additionally, colourwork is much simpler when worked in the round and with only 2 colours! As I can’t get out to source undyed yarn yet, I will obtain some luxury yarn from my local yarn shop (LYS in Ravelry speak!) and do my bit to support local independent businesses at this time.
I hope the film conveys the concept of my bowl. I would have liked it to have been larger and, were it not for unforseen circumstances, I would have had time to achieve this.
I was able to make the films in the classroom and office space myself, thanks to my husband and sister in law (she’s a secondary school art teacher). I had been concerned about trying to find stock video but was able to film exactly what I wanted myself.
I am a little disappointed with the video editing, but I did the best I could with my mobile phone and the Power Director app. As I am considering making video tutorials going forward, this is something I need more practice at. Perhaps the use of a head cam would have given a clearer sense of my contemplative crocheting rather than a third party filming me. This would also be essential for tutorials.
I think the overall effect is a little melancholy and eerie. This was intentional at the time as I was feeling down, but in retrospect I think I was going for more nostalgic than creepy! Whilst the mechanical version of “Hey Jude” by the Beatles is a sleep inducing lullaby to me as I recorded it from my childhood teddy bear, my husband (and I suspect many other viewers!) finds it terrifying and reminds him of horror movies!!! Not the effect I was aiming for!
The finished bowl would be exhibited in a gallery space with the dress attached, suspended above it as per the final frame to portray that it is a work in progress – at some point i will get back in the dress and continue crocheting the fabric of my life around me until I am fully cocooned.
I visited the national wool museum just before the second lock down! I found the Welsh blanket patterns very inspiring. I also found it interesting to discover that “stitch and b*tch” or “knit and natter” groups aren’t as new a phenomenon as I thought – before the industrial revolution ladies who hand knitted for a living often gathered together to work for company, singing hymns or reading passages from the bible as they worked.
I was thinking about the storytelling and narrative words I was given and, whilst I think I have them covered in my bowl project concept, it’s not necessarily a route I would develop further for my future business plans.
It co-incides with my discovery that I have Canadian First Nations relatives. I love Canadian First Nations art and designs – my Aunt and cousins emigrated to Prince Rupert when I was 6 and I have been out to visit a few times. In my Pecha Kucha presentation, one of the slides is of Bill Reids “The Raven and The First Men”. I chose it because I find the story fascinating and love the humourin the piece, but I also love the stylised animal representations in totem poles and other artwork by Bill Reid and other First nations artists and makers. Whilst I am visually attracted to the works, I am also conscious that there is spirituality and meaning in the imagery, and I understand the concept of cultural appropriation and why it is not morally ok for me to try to recreate this style of work.
This led to me considering my own culture, heritage and the story of my people. I have been looking into my family tree and as far as I have traced back, I am of English, Czechoslovakian and Welsh descent. On both my maternal and paternal grandmothers side, my ancestors didn’t leave Stratford upon Avon as far back as I could trace – from the early 1700’s. I was unable to go back past my paternal grandfather as he was a Czech refugee so I know nothing of my Czech heritage. On my maternal grandfather’s side, my ancestors lived in the area between Carmarthen and Crosshands for generations going back to the 1700’s. I don’t know why, but this is the branch of my family tree that I identify with.
I would like to investigate Welsh heritage more, especially as I know there is a great textile tradition with the woollen and weaving industries.
However I no longer have my childhood clothes and am not prepared to cut up my wedding dress for my bowl project (sorry!) As such, I needed to find a lot of clothing that would represent the clothing I have worn throughout my life. The Worcestershire Resource Exchange was the perfect source of such items.
They are a wonderful charity, promoting sustainability through the re-purposing of reusable resources for creative purposes that would otherwise go to landfill. http://www.wre.uk.com/about-us
I went through old photo albums, noting the clothing I wore and headed over to rummage through their fabric bins, selecting fabrics that felt familiar to me through each stage of life.
clairemaloney 