Weekend Away!
This weekend I’m taking part in a training session for grassroots activists known as Camp Wellstone in New Jersey. I feel very lucky to be able to go – and since it’s nearby I won’t have to stay overnight anywhere. Each day when the training ends I’ll drag my tired little (!) body back up to South Orange where I’ll crash. My dear, dear husband is cool with this – so I get to indulge my fantasy that something I might do in my life might actually help to heal the world. We can all dream.
A few years ago I was one of the organizers of the Million Mom March. Unfortunately a few weeks before the march there was a shakeup where the “head mom” unceremoniously dumped most of the volunteer leaders in favor of professional lobbyists groups and organizers (we were, essentially, Erin Brokovitched out of the way…)
I’d also been labled as the NRA Mom by the march leader because I had the termerity to suggest in a meeting that there were many members of the NRA (my own family included) who enjoyed hunting, but felt sick when they saw the dangerous semi-automatic weapons that their group was protecting with their lobbying efforts. How dare I actually reach across the great divide and try to bring safety minded NRA members into our camp? Very sad. Permanent change generally requires compromise.
Okay back to knitting…
Vogue
The yarn arrived for the sweater I’m working up for Vogue – it’s Lorna’s Laces and it’s lovely to work with! Extraordinary feel and resilience. I had originally swatched the piece in Art Yarns – and I think it would be exceptional in Iris’s gorgeous colorways. This is always such a rough part of designing. So much of a concept is tied up in the harmony of colors, the push-pull of different tones which rest next to each other. It almost feels like I’m knitting someone else’s design when a magazine decides that the yarn I’ve swatched in isn’t quite right and sends a different yarn in a very different colorway. The Lorna’s Laces yarn is beautiful – and I’m very curious to see how this knits up! I have several inches done and it’s very lovely. But I miss the Art Yarns palette let it go … let it go …
IK
I’m working up three things for IK right now – the difference in working with these two magazines is amazing. It may be because this is my first thing for Vogue in fifteen years, and I have an established relationship with the editor at IK, but there’s such a give and take between designer and IK, it’s refreshing. I’m actually asked what I think of the yarn they’ve selected in lieu of the yarn I swatched, and I was sent a big bag of colors to pick and choose from to create the palette for the final garment. This way of working is a luxury, and not possible for every magazine. It also creates a magazine with less of a solified uni-vision and more eclectism in the design elements.
They’re both good and valid ways to work – I can’t really say that one is absolutely better than the other – isn’t it funny how magazines have such definite personalities!?