12.12.2005
*****mental diarrea alert
i am obsessed with yarn and so i always thought maybe i should learn to knit. i spend lots of money on yarn with gorgeous colors that i don't really know what to do with yet i have had countless numbers of friends and random people who have offered to teach me to knit and i have yet to take any of them up on it. why? i don't actually want to learn to knit. i would be bored to tears but i want to make yarn. i want to make yarn like this and this it has finally come full circle. i went to school for textile design because i realized that was something you could actually do for a living and without knowing it, i had always done it. when we were in college and i was an English major and HATING it, someone said, we have a textile design program at my school and i think you would be really good at it. i already had a portfolio. Stuff I had been doing since i was a kid. i went to the portfolio review and they accepted me on the spot with no other info about my grades or anything. since i was a shitty realistic painter- a point that, to this day, one of my professors argues is not true- i decided that experimental printing and weaving were my strong suits. and when i graduated i became a colorist.
being a 'colorist' is really really really specialised. I can match color by eye or with paint in a matter of minutes. there are only a handful of us. and once you start doing it, you either keep doing it forever, or you do trend forcasting. in terms of design, color is the thing for which i live. but when you are doing ONLY that it becomes very flat and boring and tedious. i ended my corporate career doing trend and color forcasting. part of the reason i left was because i hated being so far removed from the process of actually putting my hands on the thing i was 'making'. there was no 3 dimentionality in what i was doing. i need to have more of my physical body engaged in what i am doing. i need to actually mix the colors and look at them against different surfaces and in different lights. and now, finally, i have distilled down everything that i am good at to making yarn. so i freelance doing what i was doing before in order to pay the rent but i get nice big chunks of time off. like right now. so i will make yarn
.: posted by landry 7:51 PM
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