Story of a Hat

Some ideas, well, have their own ideas; and my job is just to keep up.

If you’re subscribed to my email newsletter, you’ll recall this skein of yarn from Olivia of YarnBaker, one of my favorite small batch dyers. This is her Pimpernel colorway. I love me a good rich, dark red, but it has to be exactly the right shade, and I’m picky. Pimpernel is it, folks. I had a feeling it would be when I saw the listing in Olivia’s shop, but I knew as soon as I opened the package that this was a special skein.

So now what? A part of me wanted to keep the skein on my desk forever, just to look at, because I was afraid of not doing it justice. The other part of me, that can’t afford to buy yarn just to look at it, and doesn’t buy yarn just to look at it, told me that would be pretty lame. Yarn this awesome didn’t deserve to sit in skein form forever.

All this transpired around Christmas time (I bought the yarn in Olivia’s holiday sale). I sat with the yarn for a month, trying to pin down an idea of what to do with it. I even asked Instagram, to no firm consensus. None of the concepts that came to mind were quite right. Too derivative, too typical, too impracticable. This design needed to be different. Where no design has gone before and all that. But actually fun to knit and fun to write up.

Whenever I’m stuck for a design idea, I start with music. Usually I start with the piece, then formulate a design concept, then find yarn; this time I did it completely out of order. Classical music is my bread and butter (I have a whole collection inspired by it—go figure) but the idea of going classical for this yarn didn’t seem quite right, even though I tried. Neither did the idea of going wholesale pop. I briefly started with Separate Lives by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin (which will get a design someday; just not yet) and dropped it.

I’d love to be able to say that the inspiration came to me in a dream, which would sound a little silly. But one morning I woke up with Fallen Embers by Enya playing on a loop in my head, and that was it. Enya was my guilty pleasure listening during my teen years, when I was trying to be very highbrow and intellectual by listening to Beethoven and Verdi and Faure—all the bigwigs, no pun intended. I listened to Enya when all the distilled magnificence of Western civilization was just a little too much. My family listens to selected Enya tracks on a regular basis now, which is kind of my fault, but I hadn’t played Fallen Embers in years. It’s one of her quieter songs, subdued and atmospheric, less attention-grabbing than some of her catchier numbers like Only Time and Dark Sky Island. It’s also one of her most subtly moving, at least to me.

I got out of bed and took Fallen Embers to scratch paper, then into charting software. The concept evolved in a twisty, organic fashion—I knew I wanted a star motif, graceful curves, and bobbles like a shower of falling sparks. And vaguely Elvish, because Enya. Easier said than done; I ripped and restarted this design 3 or 4 times before it was finally right.

Overall, I couldn’t be more chuffed with the final result. One of my greatest satisfactions for me in designing is when I feel I’ve successfully translated the stylistic elements of another art form into knitting. It’s not so much about visual imitation (and in music, there’s nothing visual to imitate) as evoking the same mental images and moods. The creation of this hat in particular has brought me to the realization that, amid all the mathematical and aesthetic bullet points that I niggle over, my design process is, at the core, highly emotional. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about Fallen Embers and its significance to me at another time. For now, I’ll say that the process of getting to this point, in this design and really in any of my other pieces that I’m truly proud of, was a funky swirl of technique, inspiration, and plain old feelings that my rationalistic brain isn’t completely comfortable with. But I like what came out, and hope that you will too.

And yes, I did say it’s coming out next week. There’ll be a special coupon code in my email newsletter, so hop on that train if you haven’t already…