I have a habit of disappearing. I’m no Houdini, I promise you that. I might exist on a social media blitz high – posting on my Facebook group, Ravelry, Twitter, yada –  for a couple weeks and then disappear for awhile. That’s the nature of my existence, for now anyways, due by in large to the multitude of constraints hoisted upon me.

Yes, even while I’ve been on a 2-month staycation from the Day Job – let’s not mention that too much since I’m 36 hours away from its demise – I’ve been busy working. I’m not one to rest on my laurels. If given 2 months off, I try to use my time wisely (sorta). I believe in a philosophy of working hard and playing hard. On this staycation, however, it’s certainly been more work than anything. Between doing stuff around the house, selling things on eBay, getting rid of stuff around the house, pumping out pattern updates, and working with clients – other self-published crochet and/or knit designers – I’ve kept myself busy. Such is the case of the later in the last several days.

KRW Knitwear

Karen Ratto-Whooley contacted me nearly 8 months ago about doing the graphics for her pattern line. She’s a busy mom with an equally busy schedule of teaching classes and designing for herself and other notable publications and is like most prolific designers in that she’d rather have someone else deal with the graphics-end of things while she concentrates on the designing itself.

When Karen approached me about laying out her patterns, she was doing what most designers without graphics experience or a graphics budget do: use a basic word processing program to layout her work. Yes, one can get by doing this, but there are so many limitations to those programs, nor do they ever produce something that’s as polished in presentation as one can achieve through traditional print-publication software. That’s where I come in.

Karen wanted something simple (“minimal” is what she said) in terms of layout and color palette. She had gone ahead and had a really lovely logo created by another designer. It’s a yarn ball that leads up to a butterfly which represents her “Nonna.”

by Missa of KPixie

The layout needed to reflect her color choices she’d started with: brown and pink with lots of white space in the layout. She wanted a flexible layout that could work if she decided to include diagrams, schematics, and step-outs, or not. Additionally, she was hoping to cut down her page usage which for a simple pattern was eating up sometimes as much as 6 pages. And we certainly did that as the longest pattern of hers is only 2 pages (one sheet of paper back to back)! Now Karen is saving lots of money in up-front printing costs, enabling her to put that money back into the “profit” column without compromising the integrity of her patterns.

With a lot of back-and-forth, Karen and I, in a host of synergistic email conversations, came up with a layout design that we both love. It’s fun, airy, and flexible, simple without being understated. The important pre-pattern information – yarn, hook, notions, etc) are all in neatly organized brown framed bubbles on the side of each main product shot. The romance text – that name makes me chuckle because I instantly think of the word SWOON – is in a prominent, brown colored box near the top as well as the name of the pattern, which makes it easy for LYS’s with a lot of patterns to locate quickly. And the pattern text flows seamlessly from there on down.

Front pages of several KRW Knitwear patterns

The layout also translates well to her catalog, which she also had me do over too. The catalog is designed for 11×17 format so the back and front cover are on the same side with the two inside pages next to one another. On the bottom of the two inside pages is a series of descriptions about the features of KRW patterns as well as pointing out that Karen teaches classes and is going to be selling some kits for her patterns in January 2011.

Back and Front Cover

Two Inside Pages

There’s nothing more exciting than a make-over!

The Meaning of Creativity

I find it fascinating to talk with other designers and ask them what makes them tick, what drives their internal engines to create and keep creating even in the face of self-doubt and frustration. The answers I get always lean towards an insatiable desire to put to real form what they’re seeing and feeling inside.

I went to a workshop yesterday for the Day Job in which there were two speakers giving a dual presentation, one talking about linear perspective (from the point of view of an artist) and one on how the human eye perceives perspective (from a scientific point of view). Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly as I loved science in high school), I made the greatest connection with the scientific end of the conversation when the second speaker posted a photograph of someone’s pupil from the outside looking in. [Imagine a large circle filled with bright light and all around it dark brownish-red looking muscles surround it.] It was rather eery! I felt like I had traveled to an unrecognizable world I never thought I’d see. No, really. It was quite…humbling.

Anyway, the speaker was driving home the point that the human eye sees things backwards as it’s taken in and is reflected in the brain in order to look right side up, and that the world as seen is really quite orderly and beautiful. All things made from nature are so well designed. Think of a nautilus shell, or the structure of a beetle’s body. Or even the way a line of trees appear smaller as they go back in space and yet the trees furthest away aren’t necessarily smaller than those in front.

For me I took from that conversation that the world is indeed orderly, but people and our thoughts, visions, and ideas are more chaotic, raw. Our insatiable need to design and always move forward is like a constant need to take the chaos of our daily lives and inside our brain and make order of it in the physical sense, take the orderliness of what we see in the world and reflect it back through our own senses, our own eyes.

The Creative Process

I posted a question to Twitter yesterday asking designers (knit and crochet):

“Looking through inspirational images & yarn stash to determine next project. DESIGNERS: How do you get inspired?”

I would say a lot of my designing is a reflection of my environment, of what I like. I’m a beach person by nature having grown up at the Jersey Shore. I tend to like a more subtle, subdued color palette. As such, I’ve created a lot of designs that evoke that part of my personality. My latest design is no exception.

My response to the question I posed on Twitter was that I rummage through my yarn stash to see what I currently have and find images that inspire me at the moment. I knew I wanted to make a large handbag that I could take to the beach, whose design was easy enough manipulate in order to change the size of the bag easily, if a customer desired to do it. And I wanted to play with a new fiber. I happened to have several spools of Berwick Wraphia in Oatmeal, Green, and Turquoise I had purchased a couple years ago online and that seemed to fit the profile.

I went searching online for some cool Amy Butler (love her aesthetic!) fabric on fabric[dot]com to go with the feeling of the bag (but not match it perfectly) when I found this one (shown below). Something about the playfulness of the flowers, the use of color, and the fact that it was called, “August Fields” and my birthday is in August drew my eye and I bought a yard of fabric.

I did some searching online for beach bags (regular ones, not crochet as I tend to look towards mainstream fashion first) and came across this bag which I thought was interesting. It had a knit-like appearance to it and I wondered about how that would translate to crochet. I like that the rows of stitches seemed to start at the center and radiate out and back in at the other end, creating a curved effect. I set out to mimic that effect.

In order to create the curved shape, I had to employ short rows and linked stitches (to join the short rows to the main body of the work). The bag had some stability to it but not like I had imagined. Later on in the design process, I used green wraphia and did some surface crochet to go over the portion of the bag with the short rows, adding structure to it. That solved one problem and helped along an aesthetic issue: before doing the surface crochet, the curved shape wasn’t as pronounced. Now it was.

The remainder of the design, done in turquoise wraphia, came from seeing embroidery on off-white Mexican style, beachy shirts I used to see women wear to the beach as a child.

Lastly, the name: I wanted something that took someone to a certain time and connected them with a certain feeling. Montauk is a beachy place that boasts both a casual and upscale lifestyle, and that’s what I wanted to bag to feel like: polished, fun, but functional.

And that’s how a big bag called, “Montauk” was “born.”

Here are some quick picture from my latest pattern release, “Montauk Handbag.” I’ve included a photo fan of the first four pages. You can see that there are a great deal of photos, illustrations, and diagrams to help the crocheter along the way. Don’t be afraid because it’s labeled “Intermediate.” I use a couple more uncommon stitches like linked stitches minimally and there are photographs to assist newbies of this technique. It’s really just a matter of sticking your hook in another spot before a stitch like a double or treble crochet is finished off.

I will be talking about the design inspiration in the next blog post.

Alas, the pictures!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I think I just needed some time away alone with my thoughts. It’s been an emotional two months to say the least. I’ve kept most of my babbling to a 140 character count over at Twitter. Less is more these days. I do promise though, with the summer coming up, that I’ll post more since I’ll be home more.

I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who posted here or sent me emails in regards to my step-father passing. I can’t begin to express how comforting your words were to me at that difficult time. I cried, I smiled, and cried again at each post or email sent.

I think work immediately became my coping mechanism, keeping me so busy that I didn’t have time to crawl too far into my own head space. Between my two clients, Mary Beth Temple and Marty Miller (new client) and my crazy day job, I had enough things to do to occupy my time. Both clients were planning on selling patterns wholesale at TNNA, with Mary Beth signing her latest and greatest book, “DIY Afghans” at the Leisure Arts booth. And both had a bunch of patterns as well as other graphics needed for the show. At the height of the workload, I was clocking 18 hour work days on weekdays and long hours on the weekends since there was a ton to do.

Mx2

Marty approached me because she was interested in selling patterns wholesale. She wanted a simple pattern layout using Carolina Blue as the main color inspiration. It was important that her pictures and important text be near the top of the page so they’d be seen if they were being stocked on shelves in an LYS. This is what I came up with:

Marty also needed a logo to accompany the patterns. She wanted “Mx2,” meaning the letter “M” performed twice, as in “M” being done twice in a crochet pattern – the two M’s standing for Marty Miller. I thought it was a brilliantly clever idea. She also said she’d like it to look like it had been written as a crochet pattern. After two unsuccessful attempts at making what she wanted (I either went too fancy with the chosen crochet symbol or it wasn’t cool enough), I came up with this:

I was really happy with this effort. It utilizes a few of the colors from the layout, It’s fun and simple, like the layout. And I think it reads well. The breakthrough in the design came when I made the “2″ look like a double crochet symbol. It related well to the “M” and thus a logo was born.

So now that the chaos of dealing with two clients with the same deadline is over, I have a new deadline for something very important happening in August that I will share with you shortly. This’ll be something else that occupies my time for the summer, something I’ve been waiting for during the last 4 1/2 years. And yes, it involves a little crochet.

Stay tuned!