one week to go!

Hello! There’s just one week to go until our Making Light club kicks off, and the KDD team is very excited to share what’s to come with you! If you’ve signed up for the club, you should have received your shop discount code, and you can now sit back and get ready for your first patterns to land in your Ravelry libraries and inboxes next Friday, January 24th.

The Making Light club is all about finding light-hearted and creative ways of getting through the dark months at the start of the year, and in that spirit, I’d like to share with you an edited version of a piece I wrote a few years ago for our Wheesht project. This piece, like all of those in Wheesht, involved some words-and-pictures collaboration between Tom and myself, something which we will very much be taking forward during Making Light, as you’ll see. Here, Tom created a wonderful series of bracken photographs and photograms to accompany my words, and also kindly lent me some of his fabulous chiaroscuro images of rock pools.

Feel uninspired

I’m often asked “where do you find your creative inspiration?”  And I always answer “all around me.” Because of where I live in Scotland, at that point the questioner usually assumes that my “all around” is something grand and generic, like an expansive landscape. That assumption is incorrect. It is certainly true that I live in a place that’s often thought of as beautiful or grand—a place of wide open spaces and sweeping vistas, a place of peaks and lochs and long, wide beaches. I love living here, and I enjoy this landscape enormously, but it is not its generic grandeur that inspires me. On the contrary, I’m more inspired by specifics than generalities, by details rather than the bigger picture. I’ve lived in many towns and cities; I’ve lived in several rural areas, but I have always been inspired by my immediate surroundings, whether or not they might fit or defy any objective categorisation as spectacular or grand.  Because when I say that creative inspiration is “all around me”, I don’t mean that I find it in a beautiful view: I mean that I discover creative inspiration in kitchen tiles and turnips, in fraying twine, worn fence posts, pebbles, pencils, unruly plants and rocky pools.

The idea that we must be creatively inspired by grand or beautiful things has always seemed rather strange to me.  For why should creativity prioritise the spectacular or the extraordinary? Indeed, while a glorious sunset may have something of the obvious about it, the weird luminous beauty of a piece of fishing twine, glimpsed momentarily in the dark depths of a rock pool, isn’t obvious at all. While the sunset may fill me with awe, possess my vision, and bowl me over, I’ve done very little myself to seek that inspiration out. But, on the other hand, when I see the beauty in the twine or the rock pool I have had to pay attention, discover something unusual for myself, and striven to engage with the world around me much more carefully and closely. 

Gazing at the sunset I am inspiration’s passive vessel, but as I poke among the rock pool’s murky depths I’ve become an active and seeking participant in an inspiring process. The sunset may make me say wow, but the rock pool often makes me wonder why and how. Because of their endless capacity to make us actively curious about the world around us, I firmly believe that odd details, incidental events, and ephemeral objects, can enhance our creative making far more than any spectacular view, extraordinary sunset, or grand occasion. 

In my creative life, I’ve often been inspired to make because of incidental things I’ve heard or noticed—a line of a song misheard on the radio and transformed into a pun, an abandoned hand-written shopping list in a carpark, the surprising texture of a rhino’s arse—and I also think that it is possible to be creatively inspired by the ostensibly uninspiring. Indeed, it is the endlessly inspiring nature of the mundane, commonplace or even the downright unpleasant that perhaps interests me most of all. I’ve particularly enjoyed creatively exploring such ideas in designs like my Fernie Brae cardigan. 

I don’t like bracken. There are several reasons why that’s so. I’m a short person who likes walking, as far as it is possible, unimpeded, in the landscape that surrounds me. But bracken can grow tall, and it often poses an impediment to my walking. Bracken can stop me moving through my world, and stop me seeing and experiencing the places that I love. In early spring, I watch the first primordial green curls appear from last year’s growth with horrid fascination. On a warm April day, passing a fernie brae on foot, I can hear the plants beginning to unfurl, crackling and popping into irrepressible, brazen life. By midsummer, the bracken is two feet tall and ruthlessly efficient, each stem growing at regular intervals from the next; each spreading out its fronds to catch every ray that falls through the tree canopy; each transforming itself into a weird sun-catching disc, floating in languid, alien suspension above the woodland floor. By July, the bracken is at my chest; by August, it has reached my chin. Fronds brush against my cheek as I try to move across the hillside, fibrous stems wind themselves stubbornly about my legs. My feet (never sure of themselves, post-stroke) are caught and tangled. I trip and fall among the pungent spores. 

Bracken fills me with a powerful, instinctual aversion, and there’s another specific reason why that’s so: ticks. Bracken is a great habitat for ticks; ticks carry Lyme disease; and avoiding ticks and tick bites is an important consideration of enjoying the great Scottish outdoors. I’m assiduously careful about covering up my skin on summer walks, and regularly check myself, Tom, and our dogs, for ticks (as part of the practical everyday reality of living in a bracken-covered landscape). 

For obvious reasons, then, bracken is not something you’d imagine I’d wish to dwell on or explore as a source of creative inspiration. But then something happened.

Towards the end of a long winter, the Scottish landscape can seem very grey and colourless. As someone who regularly suffers from depression in the dark months of the year, the late winter landscape often appears to match my mood, forming a general pattern of shades of grey: monotonous, dreary, emptied of colour or light.

Daily walking has always been my best way of managing the seasonal aspects of my depression, and this particularly difficult February I decided I would use my walks to try to seek out colour. With the camera on my phone, I took photographs every day, recording the colour in the dead, grey end-of-winter landscape: a red-purple dawn; bright green algae; the distinctive minty shade of lichen Ramalina Farinacea hanging, rich and ripe as winter fruit on the February trees’ bare, cold branches; the bold burgundy hue that gathers around the tips of birches viewed from a distance;  the ripples on a dull sea loch that are not, in fact, grey at all but the palest, the most delicate of turquoises. In this apparently grey landscape, I realised, there were, in fact countless beautiful and intriguing colours. And most intriguing of all to me was the sheer range and beauty of the colours of the bracken. 

The beauty of the bracken truly shocked me. Stepping out on an icy morning, the bracken’s frozen fingers waved a cheery silver greeting, while under a heavy hoar frost, its fronds became something unimaginably delicate, as the plant transformed itself into pure white lacework of a fineness exceeding the capacity of any human hand. On a dull, damp day, a random shaft of sunlight would suddenly change the bracken’s dull, dead tones into the brightest, the most luminous of tangerines and then, as the sun dipped low toward the horizon on a slow bright afternoon, my whole world might come alive with the colour of the bracken, as all the hills around me glowed warmly, russet brown. Even rotting down, after weeks of heavy rain, the colours the bracken took on were distinctive and intriguing. There was something so striking, so incredibly beautiful in the deepening wine-dark hues of the bracken’s slow, wet decay. 

By simply taking the time to look very carefully at something I ostensibly despised, I began to appreciate it afresh. The more I really looked at bracken, the more I began to really see it, and the more I was able to acknowledge the aesthetic depth and complexity of the colours and textures with which it enriched my world. 

By observing the changes of the bracken, by examining its detail, I also began to better understand the distinctive and integral role it played in the character of my much-loved familiar landscape. I’d previously only thought of bracken together with a range of negative things: ticks, impeded movement, physical aversion, falling over. All of these things were bound up in my own personal, embodied experience of the landscape, and I’d somehow projected that experience onto the character of a plant! The more I thought about it, the more I realised that my own mental concept of bracken carried weird, excessive overtones; I somehow regarded the plant as possessing a ruthless, irrepressible agency that was simultaneously primordial and futuristic; I interpreted its natural behaviour as bellicose; I associated its very smell and texture with disease or infiltration. All of the negative characteristics I’d ascribed to this plant were my own completely human concepts, and all were variously symptomatic of my own psychological fear and physical distaste. Starting to really look at bracken not only allowed me see it objectively and anew—that is, to begin to appreciate some of its essential aesthetic qualities—but to start to question the oddly virulent range of meanings I’d decided to project onto it. All of those negative associations were simply about me, and not about the bracken itself at all. Paying attention to the bracken didn’t make me suddenly begin to fall in love with it—I wasn’t going to rip off my clothes and roll around in it gleefully, or start thanking it when it tripped me up or anything—it was just that the plant didn’t seem quite as disagreeable as it had done to me heretofore.  To my excessively negative recollections and meanings I’d added a new store of interesting, aesthetic associations that both enriched my own mental landscape, and enhanced my understanding of the ordinary natural world around me. Simply by noticing the seasonal and temporal and colourful changes of the bracken, the plant I’d once found unpleasant and oppressive had suddenly become intriguing and inspiring. 

So I began to see bracken differently. And simply by starting to see differently, I began to think creatively.  And it is quite hard for me to put into words how very positive, how mind-changing these tiny glimmers of creative thought were in the middle of that grey winter. Because, for me, such small creative beginnings can often open a clear path out of a dark mood. Depression forces upon me a horribly absolute, unquestioning mental state, but by simply noticing the bracken, enjoying its appearance and questioning what it had meant to me, I’d successfully disturbed the grim fixity of my depressed mind with a new and refreshing element of curiosity. Curiosity is a great motivator, the beginning of a form of simple action that, in my case, really helps to counteract depression’s awful lassitude. Suddenly I was thinking about creative possibilities. Might I knit something inspired by bracken’s beautiful winter palette? Could I wear something that echoed these shifting seasonal hues from tangerine to wine-dark red? Simply by reflecting on some interesting colours in the landscape, moving on to consider yarn shades, and then picking up some skeins and needles, I’d forced a shift, a moment of expansion, upon my stuck-fast mental horizons. 

In so many different ways for me, creative thinking is the polar opposite of depressive thought and on countless occasions, I’ve found that simply being able to discover a mere spark of inspiration in my everyday surroundings is the very best tool I have at my disposal to force a crack in the dark ceiling that lets some light back in. 

Depression is forever staring inward, but creative thinking always looks beyond itself. 

One of the worst illusions of depression is a particular kind of melodramatic impulse. When I feel at my worst, everything can seem so completely hopeless that I’m unable to imagine anything practical that might help. Yet, it is precisely when I reach this low point that my mind also has a tendency to reach after something foolish, and my feelings of hopelessness are accompanied by a weird desire for a special something that might just save me from myself: an interesting event, a mysterious sign, the arrival of a supremely capable unknown person who has turned up with the sole intention of providing me with solace. But this fatuous desire—this melodramatic need to be released from depression’s awful grasp—is one of the most pointless (and dangerous) symptoms of depression itself. For, when there are no signs, nothing magical or remarkable occurs, and that stranger with all the answers does not knock on the door, my worst fears about the futility of everything can appear to be confirmed. At this point, it is very important to force myself to be pragmatic: I’m highly unlikely to come across anything grand or numinous, amazing or incredible, and the vague wish for such things is not only utterly useless but unhelpful too.  Rather, I tell myself,  the path out of this dark place is always practical, and not magical. It’s a path formed of tiny gestures, small actions, commonplace happenings, and very ordinary things. It’s the path of my own curiosity. And I am perfectly capable of taking a few steps along that path myself. 

My point is that mundane objects, everyday details, or even those things that we find not only find mildly uninspiring but horribly unpleasant may in fact, if we look hard enough, turn out to be rich sources of creative inspiration. We don’t need to find the sublime to feel inspired. We don’t need the high peak, the grand gesture, the wide landscape, the beautiful view or the stunning sunset to enrich the range of our perspectives. By thoughtfully examining what’s immediately to hand in our everyday surroundings we are all able to actively expand our creative horizons. In paying close attention to ordinary objects and discovering their commonplace, yet arresting, and continually changing beauty, we might force a change of direction from bleak inaction to motivation and, from what may have seemed the least promising of all beginnings, we could start something different, something useful, something new. For me now,  bracken is as much about a series of small, significant shifts in curiosity and aesthetic awareness, as it is about disease-carrying insects and unmanageable undergrowth. 

I reflected on those small shifts as I worked against depression, took forward my creative ideas, and began to work on my Fernie Brae cardigan. I thought about those shifts as I swatched, drew up a chart, calculated stitch counts, wound off the yarn, took out my needles. I brought those shifts to mind as I knitted, forming them anew with every stitch.  And, when in subsequent grim, grey winters I take out my tangerine and wine coloured cardigan from the wardrobe and put it on, I can think again about how depression can gradually transform itself into creative thinking; how feeling uninspired might turn into inspiration. 

The Making Light club begins next Friday, January 24th! Will you join us?