The First Digest! Cool Books, Pattern Stuff, and 'Girl' as a Gender

Written while digesting: one slice of foraged blackberry and courgette bread, 5 nasturtium leaves, 4 pea pods, and 2 nasturtiums from my garden.

I’m going through something some kind of growth- part of that is eating plants from the garden haha!

Wow haha, it’s been a big week! For me personally and for the business! I can’t be-live I’m writing the first of these newsletters- it feels a little bizarre after thinking about it for so long. It’s R’s (my kid’s) first week back at school so a lot feels possible.

I think that for the first little while we will be feeling it out in terms of how to format these and what works/looks best/feels the nicest to do. Feel free to skip around and see if and what takes your fancy. Anyway- here goes nothing!

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Cool Stuff Spotlight:

Fiction Fibre’s new release ‘Evil Fruit’ stopped me in my tracks- the COLOURS! Catie’s yarn collections are always really attractive to me but this one is just so so sexy. She also writes a zine series that follows ‘…Fanny, an extraterrestrial yarn dyer who is determined to find love with an Earth boy.’

You can also find her on insta @fictionfibre

Also, my favourite artist ever Jeffrey Gibson has released a new book showcasing indigenous contemporary art and I want it SO bad. I’ve been obsessed with his work since I first saw some of it in person at the CAC Cincinatti in like.. 2013 or something? You really have to check out his work- he’s also on insta as @jeffrune!

I also saw this book on insta from Common Threads and it sounds super interesting. I’ve been mulling on some anti-charity feelings, how charity exists best in- and maybe perpetuates- inequality. Would we need charity if we had more power? Of course as a disabled textile artist this book seems like it would be exactly the right place for me to start exploring those thoughts more- maybe worth a read?

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Pattern Stuff:

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I wanted to share this close up so you could see the amazing buttons I co-designed with Soorin of Wobbly Digital - more on that another day!

This week you may have noticed we launched the Bygone Blouse on Ravelry (and Payhip.) It’s a kind of amazing and terrifying feeling finally launching stuff you’ve been working so hard on for so long but it’s nice to have it finally in the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I don’t want to be focused on business and making patterns that are easily consumable, I’ve been really excited lately about trying to focus on designing for intermediate knitters, and how to make patterns that encourage folks to co-design, take their time, and spend knitting time more focused on how they will feel themselves in their garments not just on the finished product but it’s a funny line to toe.

I think maybe there’s something deep rooted in the way we consume now, since everything is off the rack we forget we are allowed to participate in design- even when we make our own clothes! Recently I just literally remembered that I can sew whatever I want and not just what I see others making- like I’m a fashion designer- how did I forget that?? I’m trying not to put pressure on myself here to come to full conclusions- just to enjoy mucking around in thoughts!

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Rose and I have been conducting sort of a self-guided teach-ourselves a pattern maths and grading course over the last few months (particularly Rose because spreadsheets make me cry sometimes). Up to now, I have worked with the amazing Jen Parroccini (who I incidentally designed a logo for!) but she is stepping away from pattern grading as a service and it’s just the kick up the butt we needed to face the fear.

We both were big overachiever academic kids in school but we also both struggle to process different types of information so a lot of it is a funny little neurodivergent tangle of our wonderful strengths and depths of knowledge in a lifetime of special interests that conveniently feed into this new skillset vs our two very overwhelmed little brains doing Very Big Brain Stuff.

But yesterday I finished knitting our first sample of something we conceived entirely from scratch using a numbers-first technique, spreadsheets, and our own garment making knowledge!!!! It is such a big moment! More on all of this another day as well I’m sure- I think Rose will definitely write some about what resources they have found the most useful on the spreadsheet side of things. They’re the coder and I’m the patternmaker, it really helps to have both!

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OKAY SO I HAVE SOME FEELINGS/QUESTIONS ABOUT BEING A GIRL

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Bonus picture of me around 11 in front of the big bookshelf of theology 😅

We are in the era of the ‘girlie’, we have ‘girl dinner’, we love a ‘baby girl’ we are really going thru something obsessed with girls idk it’s funny to be in the thick of, and lots of people have super hot takes rn, but I am here to talk about ME AND MY FEELINGS not wade into the discourse lmao. This feels very vulnerable but exciting to write and share.

I’ve always preferred to be called a girl. I don’t love the word ‘woman’ for me, it feels odd and uncomfortable like a sour blackberry- not intolerable, and still sort of exciting, but a little off. To me ‘girl’ represents a time when I’m allowed to be how I am. Talk a lot, be a LOT, wear the wild things, have this sort of freedom almost like a sort of different state before everything freezes over into set in stone gender roles and expectations. I don’t mean to say that womanhood isn’t also a beautiful thing, so deep and wide and impossibly varied, it just feels like it’s not entirely for me- maybe it will be one day.

I wonder a lot about how neurodivergence plays into gender, of course theres so much about neuroqueer identities I will have to curtail myself, but so much of what I shy away from about ‘womanhood’ is the feeling that it comes as a conclusion to autistic/adhd/etc traits, a full stop where the things that are me become childish. (again, I hasten to add that not all autistic women/AFAB folks do or should feel this way, this is SO personal)

This year or maybe last year my mum Flannery O’kafka (they/she) came out as non binary - it’s kind of thrown me out of whack when I think about gender and how I feel about being a girl! I just thought it might be kinda interesting to share a little glimpse of my brain as I process it. My feelings probably won’t stay the same for long!

Being raised to be a girl by a parent who it turns out is non binary is a bit of a head scratcher, I keep thinking in hindsight about how the way their experience and perceptions of girlhood are so totally different than what it is for cisgender folks. How do you grow up knowing your experience of gender is different, trying to conform to girlhood, and then attempt to communicate and instil girlhood in a child?

It’s funny now looking back and seeing how they tried to reject the girlhood they received and teach the childhood they wanted under the guise of ‘girlhood’. So many things for better or worse like dying my clothes black and green, only allowing Star Wars and Lord of the Rings barbies, and encouraging me to be expansive in my play- sometimes at the expense of me enjoying things that are more typical to what girls are encouraged to enjoy in our culture - now feel like they are somehow actions of gender expression before she really understood what she was trying to communicate.

Now I’m set in a little whirlwind trying to understand what it was exactly that I felt seen in in the first place! Is it being a girl? Is it something about childhood as a whole as a space to express neurodivergent traits more safely? Is it something about a much different gender expression that I was being taught and what I thought was girlhood? Is girlhood what I thought it was at all? It’s fun and weird and mind stretching all at once, I hope you enjoyed hearing about it :)

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I honestly had no idea I would have so many things I wanted to share with you all but I’ve really had fun writing it! There are so so many more things to chat about but it will have to wait til next time!

Have a great weekend!
-Lydia xx