Into the Deep

I have been in Redondo Beach, CA, at the first North American Rowan Knitting retreat and it has been absolutely fabulous, both in terms of meeting wonderfully creative women, but also in terms of the workshops and I am leaving filled with inspiration and ideas.  I am also leaving with at least six more projects in my head, four of them on needles (to add to the three I already have going at home).  A tad excessive yes, but also exactly what I needed to get myself over the hump from wanting to return to the creative life but treading too cautiously, admittedly secretly convinced that, despite any claims about being an artist, or hoping to be an artist, that I am a good craftsperson but without an artistic bone in my body.  And there I was suddenly in the deep water, ready to become a dolphin, swimming and leaping and hoping to never wash back up on shore. 

The process started Monday morning with Dee Hardwicke, who had transformed the L’Atelier store into a magical workroom filled with inspiration, and not a small amount of terror, at least for me.  I learned we were going to draw, chart what we drew into something we could knit, and then proceed to begin knitting.  I was nervous about the drawing part, convinced as I am that drawing is not part of my skill set.

First we started with hard pastels, and simply making lines on paper.  Everyone’s paper was different.  Mine was pretty, but there is nothing very artistic here….

Then we were supposed to draw something.  Dee suggested a leaf and for those of us who were more timid drawers, that alone seemed ambitious, although there were others who were far more confident and ambitious.  Surprisingly, I found I enjoyed making leaves.  I enjoyed working with the pastels.  Perhaps my struggle with drawing is more a matter of medium; perhaps I should try again, working with pastels, or even watercolors, rather than the hard lines of pencils.  Just the act of drawing itself was a revelation.  Somehow however, I managed to take a mirror-image photo.  I don’t know how I did that, or how to undo it either.

Dee then proceeded to show us how to graph our images onto a knitters grid made to the tension of the yarn we were to be using.  

And we were off….

Dee had many samples to inspire us as we chose colors…

We knit much of the afternoon.  I truly enjoyed the process, loved being reminded of how much my younger self had adored color work and intarsia.  I felt connected to some part of myself that had been put aside during the years when the kind of focused knitting that this kind of color work requires was impossible.  

I ended up ripping out my knitting as soon as I returned to my room.  Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because my gauge was too loose, and it was becoming difficult to maintain tension.  I used the suggested size needles, even though I know that I often need to size down.  I was not at my best that first day, having walked into the Los Angeles air only to be suddenly pounded by massive congestion.  I thought I had caught a cold from my grandson, but now I think it may be simply a sinus attack from something going on in the air in the LA area.    I immediately cast on again, on smaller needles, making smaller progress between other workshops and social gatherings.   Already I’ve learned from the process, have changed the pattern of my stitching slightly, hopefully to add more dimension and life, but I won’t really know if it worked until I am further along.  

In retrospect, although October is not yet over, I can say that for all I dragged myself kicking and screaming through this month, October has become in one sense almost a creative boot-camp, jumpstarting passions for fabric, food, yarn and revealing depths, perhaps, that I would have been reluctant to explore on my own.