I’ve talked a bit about how very proud I am of the work that I did with Pamela Wynne on the Juniper Moon Farm Herriot collection, but also I wanted to take the time to talk here about the genesis of my designs. It’s fun to tell a story.
After swapping our inspiration photos and outlining how we wanted to organize the collection, we decided to go ahead and make our sketches. It’s incredibly nerve-wracking, let me tell you, to casually send over a sketch (or seven) to someone whose work I admire as much as I do Pam’s. Especially since my fashion illustration (ahem) leaves a little to be desired (Truly. Susan was giving a trunk show out West, and the shop owner said something like, “Wow, if we’d seen from her sketches that these garments would look this good, we’d have been even more excited about the Herriot collection!” So, well, maybe I’m not anything as blunt as a bad drawer, but I’m certainly an inexact visual communicator.).
So, there’s that.
(I learned wisp-hands, by the way, from the illustrations for the terribly-embarrassing-moments section of Seventeen– illustrated girls without fingers were always, you know, walking into the boys’ locker room or dropping tampons in public or something.)
So, that turned into the Egbertine Hat. You can see that I scrapped the tassels, as well as the two-color garter st border. Why complicate matters?
I didn’t know whether to be proud about the fact that I wasn’t the only one with ombré beanies on the brain this summer. I can’t really be sad about being outshone by BT Fall. I mean, goodness gracious.
photo © Caro Sheridan
The Egbertine Cowl is one of my favorite pieces in the collection. It’s simple, attractive, as easy to knit as it gets, pleasantly weighty, and the softest thing in the world. But the best part is that it’s a honest-to-goodness pantoum.
BAM.
The pattern runs from black to white and back around, continually recontextualizing each of the ten colors in relation to the others. The interactions of color are subtler (but therefore, to me, more exciting) because we’re working with a specifically limited color palette– only natural shades. These ten colors and their gorgeous interplay will show up again, in Margaret.
photo © Caro Sheridan
Until then, enjoy, y’all, and deeply ponder how wonderful it is that a longish cowl is also a visual representation of a poetic form.
