Process is the Product

With the completion of the new hat designs, I'm pretty much done with shop production. I might knit up some re-stock on a few pieces, but I might not. We'll see. After this season, no work will be available for sale, so if you wanted to buy, now is the time.

I've never liked using the term "one of a kind," but there are pieces that I've produced and sold that will never be made again. Others were of a limited run of two to five. That's the way recycled yarn lots work. I've recycled a lot of sweaters, and only once have I found the same sweater a second time. Once. Aside from the limited nature of recycled yarn, there's also the work itself to consider. A lot of hats I've sold were simply a pain in the ass to produce, and because of that will never be made again. Then the recycled yarn of the original piece will get used up, and the opportunity to duplicate will be gone. I guess the whole point of this long-winded paragraph is that good work is already "one of a kind," and that if the work is truly original, then using "one of a kind" as a selling point comes off to me as… I don't know… redundant?

My work has always been about design. Divide, Shear and Reflect (at their most basic) are shapes: the cross, the parallelogram and the diamond, respectively. Throughout each series, I have demonstrated that knitting technique diversifies the compositions of a single shape in some pretty cool ways. Each sequential variation within each series has utilized the space of it's designated shape uniquely, and I've organized them with NATO phonetic naming structures. It's all "Process." I produce tangible demonstrations of visual thinking. My work has never been about knitting. What I'm selling is my creative process.

Or at least I will be until I close my shop on December sixth. When will it be open again? I have no idea. Why am I closing? Because I want to do something else. I want to learn something new. I want to offer something other than hand knits. So in order to do that, I need to creatively explore. I need to go get lost in the wilderness or something. I need to evolve. And let's face it: the shop is just one aspect of my web presence. I'll still have this blog, my Facebook and Twitter, and all the rest. I'll never stop doing creative things, they just won't be for sale (for a while).