Thoughts on making, thoughts on patterns

On Women's Day 8th of March 2018:

Whenever starting designing a new pattern, we often have to make a few starts before a project starts going forward like on rails. During this process of going back and forth the necessary confidence gets built in the stitches. So, don’t give up even though some days you feel like it. I hope you also have curiosity, passion, and resilience to crochet and knit outside and beyond the existing patterns (of life), to create beauty of your kind and to stand up for your voice. I also hope you have the patience to explain why something is important for you, important to be seen, what is hidden in the stitches – your thoughts, your emotions, your inspiration sources, your life. And even when using existing patterns, we all have our beautiful handwriting, our hooks, so the end result will never be the same. What you create will be yours. And that is what we do anyway when we learn something new. We use existing patterns to learn the necessary skills so that we can then start creating patterns of our own. We learn the rules so that we can start breaking them the right way.

Maybe this is the way crochet and knitting as art forms go forward, and patterns of life. I hope that you also try to open up to different kinds of patterns, different kinds of beauty, and therefore learn from others, may they be friends of crocheted diamonds or knitted brioche, or both. And how important it is to understand your own pattern world inside, bring it into consciousness. Only then you can understand and honor the patterns of others. Then you learn your true colors and how colors are combined together in different ways.

For us makers there is also huge gratitude towards the previous generations. We build on their achievements. We continue working with their wips, projects, and patterns crocheted halfway. Some of the patterns we inherit may be broken and we are left with the task to mend them and to sort out the tangled yarns. We may end up discarding the old ones altogether and just hope to be free from them haunting us. We also get inspiration from history and our contemporaries. Names and voices of women like Brené Brown and Karen Blixen are hidden among my stitches and lines of diamonds and I keep on adding inspiration there. And when it is our time to give the hooks and patterns forward, we always hope we manage to give richer patterns and tools for the following generations. I hope we show them our love towards handmade, our passion to create and therefore how we love ourselves. It is the example that counts most after all. I also hope we manage to pass on the love for the self-made since it teaches that everything worthwhile having and achieving in life takes time and effort – and gives real joy. We may count the stitches wrong in the beginning, we fail, we learn and then eventually succeed. Making teaches that nothing is perfect not a person nor a handmade item (in a time when I sometimes feel that even our thoughts should be perfect). I've come to thinkt that making teaches us empathy. And first and foremost I hope that we manage to support children and give them enough self-confidence to use unique color combinations, to live a creative life and to create new and unique patterns, and perhaps not that much of what we see in the world of media. And we hope that they are free from our broken patterns.

So, I hope we keep on making.