If you remember, one of the classes I took at Shetland Wool Week was “Quotidian Colourwork with Felicity Ford.” During the class we got started on swatches of our designs, and learned how to iterate on our first pass at a design. The 3hr class was nowhere near enough time to actually finish and leave with a polished pattern. I left the class with a beginning and knowledge of what color yarns to buy:
I have, I am pleased to report, stuck with my plan to continue working on my swatch. See how much bigger it is now?
I think I know where I want to go with it, but it changes the design from a 9st to an 8st repeat, and I felt it was important to get a better view of what I’ve completed thus far. So I bound off my swatch, except the steek stitches, unraveled those, and cut it open:
I still need to block it a bit before I cast on for swatch #2. I’m not satisfied with the result, but I’m really happy with the process and I think I can get to what I envision.
To me, this is the mark of a great teacher and a great class. I was the kid who went to art camp, and whose mom signed her up for art lessons. They can be a real mixed bag, and the best ones are those where you don’t bring home an amazing and perfect product after just a couple classes. If that happens, you probably aren’t learning the process, you’re just being guided to a great result. But when you try to do it on your own – you’ll be lost.
This was something my mom understood and taught me to look for. For a while, my brother and I were taking private classes on using pastels. We’d pick a photograph to reproduce, which was fine. What wasn’t fine was that we were not learning how to analyze the photo, the colors, etc… to reproduce it on our own. Our teachers’ goal was to ensure their students reproduced their photos extremely well fairly quickly so that parents would have top-notch art to frame and display at home to show off their childrens’ skills.
When my brother and I tried to do what we did in class at home, we were thoroughly lost. The instructors were doing too much of the analytical work (what colors, how to sketch out the image first, where to add the darks and the highlights) – we just followed their recipe. My mom recognized our frustration, and the classes ended. She’d enrolled us to learn, not to give her pretty pieces to brag about, and we weren’t learning. Frankly, if you don’t have some ugly results as you go, you aren’t learning. “Failures” are part of the learning process, and are really only failures if you aren’t given the space, or feedback, to build on them.
I was pretty sure Quotidian Colourwork was the useful sort of class: the course started from a place of “your first attempt won’t be the last, neither will your second, and maybe not your third.” Felicity showed us examples of her own creative process and walked through her thoughts as she iterated her attempts. The proof though, for me, was that more than two weeks after taking the class, I could pick up my swatch and make real progress on it.