A friend of mine, Lee Ann Dalton, shared a message on Facebook yesterday that has inspired me. You’ll see the irony in it once you read it …
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” -Chuck Close
You get it now, I’m sure. So how did this inspire me and what does it mean for knitters? Well, like Chuck says … “all the best ideas come out of the process” … which means that all you have to do is knit! You don’t have to now what to knit, just pick up your needles and some yarn and start knitting. For me this means getting the final 3 patterns for the upcoming scarf calendar done. Oops, did I say that out loud? 😉 Yes, there will be a calendar for 2015, and there is a special theme to the scarves. If you’ve read even a few of my posts you can probably guess what it is. I’m really excited about it as Laura Henshaw Patterson will be contributing half the patterns (yes, the patterns will be included with the calendar). If you’re unfamiliar with her work you can find her all over the internet in the usual places knitters like to hang out in under the label Fiber Dreams. That’s the link to her Facebook page.
And we’ll be working with Susan from Kollage Yarns who is supplying the yarn for the scarves. We’ll be using their new yarn Happiness which is a 100% fine Super-Wash Merino Wool. The patterns will be done in 3 weights of the yarn (worsted, DK, and fingering) and a multitude of colors. Here is a link to the yarn … Happiness. There’s a few patterns for the yarn already … click on the picture below to see them!
So very soon you’ll be able to see the fruits of my inspiration. Thank you Lee Ann for getting me past this little knitter’s block I’ve been having. And thanks Chuck for those sage words! Knit on!
Hugzzz 😎
