Alice Starmore at Interweave Knitting Lab
I had the pleasure of hearing Alice Starmore's lecture this past Saturday at Interweave Knitting Lab. For more than two hours, Ms. Starmore talked about her "Colorful Life" - illustrating throughout with one lovely slide after another. She didn't discuss knitting design per se at all; instead she talked about her home, the Isle of Lewis, as the source of her creative inspiration. She was gracious and funny, and she has a mesmerizing accent.
I couldn't get any decent pictures during the talk, so instead I'm going to drop some photos of Lewis scenes from Flickr into this post for you. AS showed many of her own beautiful photographs - not only of the island's landscapes, flora and fauna, but of her girlhood and her artwork.
photo by Paula The Destroyer
Ms. Starmore clearly is deeply rooted on Lewis - born and raised - and has a reverent connection to the island's natural world and traditional culture. This resonates with me - I am a person who is lucky to be surrounded by the natural world, and I am in it, and appreciate it, every single day. Such a rare thing nowadays, to live in the same landscape you were born in - to grow older witnessing dramatic changes to a traditional culture, while the physical surroundings change little.
photo by Kristi Herbert
She talked eloquently about the sea and shore, plants and animals, the light; the fishing industry, childhood summers on the moor, peat cutting; traditional gansey knitting, the Harris tweed industry, and natural dyeing.
photo by Scott Denham
She told the story of the amazing Callanish stone circle.
photo by danielduce
She talked about her croft and the conservation she does on it (special grazing to preserve the machair soil and plant community); her work doing bird surveys for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the fight to keep wind turbines off the Lewis moors.
She talked about the work she and her husband do at Windfall Press, publishing Gaelic-language books, and showed a lot of her artwork - tapestries, and what she calls "layered images" which often begin with a photograph, over which she paints. You can see both in her MAMBA exhibition from 2008, which celebrated Lewis's beauty as a reminder of what would be destroyed by the wind farm project.
photo by Travels with a Camera and a dog
She talked about how light, pattern, texture, and color - of stone, sand and sea, plants and animals - guides her color and texture designs and contributed to the color development of her Hebridean yarn line.
photo by hds
She showed quite a few slides of her designs old and new, often paired with a photograph taken on the island that mirrored colors or feel of the design in some way. She said she's often asked if Tudor Roses will be reprinted, and her answer was "You never know." And she closed by showing the newest designs and promising that "there will be more."
We'll be looking forward to them!
To see Alice Starmore's available yarns and knitting patterns, visit Virtual Yarns. For a near-complete interactive index of Alice and Jade Starmore designs, visit the Knitfinder Starmore pattern index. For a guide to Starmore books and yarns old and new, click here.
