origin story pt. 1

this is the first instalment in a 3-part series about how sunflower knit got to where it is now. parts 2 and 3 will be released over the next couple of wednesdays.

i’ve been surrounded by textiles my entire life. my nan could always be found knitting up a new batch of dishcloths or blanket to welcome a new baby, while my gramma crocheted like a wizard and was that old school polish knitter who could look at you, cast on some stitches, and have a perfectly fitting garment for you in no time. my dad bought an industrial sewing machine to repair his parachutes when they got damaged, and my mum gets to take responsibility for teaching me how to sew and knit and supplying me with basically any textile-based craft kit you can think of as my interests shifted year by year.

knitting in the change room during tech week

i started knitting when i was about 8, and picked my needles up and down several times before picking them back up at the start of my undergrad degree in 2008 and never setting them back down. i was doing a combined honours degree in acting and gender studies, and unbeknownst to me, that degree would become the root of my current career 12 years later while also being the source of enough anxiety to keep my hands constantly moving my needles. i could be found anywhere around campus with a wip, whether sitting in a lecture or backstage. it helped the monkey part of my brain stay distracted so that the intellectual part of my brain could process heavy bouts of theory and practical application (thankfully the primary focus of my gender studies degree, which was a cross-listed program that had you dipping in and out of the majority of other degrees around campus). it wasn’t until the final year of my degree that i encountered a purely theoretical course, and thankfully i had a fiercely intersectional feminist prof who made a point of ensuring the syllabus we covered included a heavy dose of queer and race theory. still, that particular class solidified for me that theoretical inquiry without any serious consideration for how its application impacted the real lives of people, particularly those areas of theory rooted in identity politics, was never going to be acceptable to me.

you must always have a consideration for the greater world around you and how your actions impact the agency of others - debating the basic human rights of people or environmental rights just for the sake of debate when you do not have a personal stake in the real world results makes you an asshole, not an intellectual academic.

devising interdisciplinary performance installations, complete with handknit costumes and yarn & light sets

i probably should have known better than to apply to grad school based on my already-frustrated relationship with academic bureaucracy in 2012, but i loved (and still love) deep learning, and so i applied and got into a master’s program in the uk for collaborative devising in theatre. my time in the uk, primarily spent in london, would teach me a lot about myself - that i don’t function well in arbitrary hierarchies, that i also don’t love flat power structures for working relationships when those structures aren’t well-defined and the team’s individual skills and weaknesses aren’t identified and roles assigned accordingly, that the red tape of bureaucracy will never be an adequate safety substitute for the self-determination of a marginalized group, and that being sexually harassed on a daily basis by strangers would push my gender dysphoria to a point that spiralled the rest of my mental health while also honing my resting bitch face and igniting my aries fire to a level that has served me in the years since. i would also have my only real retail experience to date thanks to my time working in a yarn shop in north london, and although i’m pretty sure all of my paychecks went back to the shop, i had valuable experience with engaging with the yarn buying public and had begun working on my first designs, although it would be a year until i published my first.

early dye pot results on the line, back when i caked all my skeins and didn’t know the tricks to skipping the spaghetti-esque headache.

when i returned to canada at the end of 2013, i had my second degree, no money, and an absolutely broken brain that took about 8 months to retrain to become a functional adult again. i was burnt out in every way possible, and if it wasn’t for my supportive parents, i don’t know what things would look like today. in february 2014, my mum pushed me out the door to attend a natural dyeing workshop with kelly ruth, who ended up becoming my first mentor in my natural dyeing practice. i’d been fascinated by the alchemy of natural dyes for years, and had dabbled in it unsuccessfully during my undergrad, but theatre had been my primary focus and it wasn’t until i began working with kelly that i really applied the knowledge she shared with me and devoted the time to start learning the ins and outs of it.

that summer, i applied to a residency at white rabbit, and that was the turning point for me to get back to the trajectory that i now find myself on. sleeping in the apple orchard, waking up to the clucks of hens, walking along the ocean bed at low tide and burying myself in the woods during the rest of my days, it was the first time since before i’d moved to the uk that i felt like myself again. i’d showed up with an idea to work on eco-printing and solar dyeing with local plants and to collect soundscapes of the land, but after showing up with a pair of antlers in my suitcase, i ended up abandoning the sound collection in favour of playing with the many bones that my fellow rabbits gifted to me. the most nourishing part of the week was spending time with a deer skeleton that another rabbit found along the path in the woods, which was almost entirely decomposed with the exception of a bit of bug activity around the hooves. i found a cone of pure wool in the shed and spent the majority of my week in communion with the deer and its bugs, knitting carefully around its shape with material that i knew would decompose with it back into the ground. at the end of my time at red clay farm, i left with a bolt of silk printed over a fire with big sunflower heads and one vertebrae from my deer friend, delivered by the resident puppy before i began my time with the rest of the bones. i also left to return to the prairies with a new job, one that would have me working administration in an arts organization for the next three years and that, for all its faults, would teach me even more about myself and my capabilities. and finally, i was returning to the release of my very first pattern, double scoop, which i’d designed for a shawl design contest for manitoba fibre festival and wolseley wool. who’d have thought that six years later, both organizations would be such a central part of my life and that first pattern would have lit the match that started my current career?

the very first pattern, and some of my earliest selfie work photoshoots.