FOREWORD
“ A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
— John Keats( 1795-1821)
No matter how far we have evolved since the days of admiring cave painters, today, as in the beginning, something in the human psyche forces us to stop and stand in awe when we observe excellence in craftsmanship. It is a deep respect that we feel when we see something meticulously made by hand. The reality is that the ability to achieve that excellence is present in each of us, and there are few modern-day art forms more readily accessible for us to experience and connect to that side of ourselves than in hand knitting.
After years of teaching hand-knit garment design and watching the magic of the creative process, as well as the joy and excitement of even the newest knitters as their first-time design ideas came to life, I decided to translate that class into a book. The goal was to reach an audience well beyond my classroom. With that in mind, in 2010, Knitwear Design Workshop( KDW) was released as a major comprehensive design reference work. The widespread interest in KDW became the basis for a series of online worldwide design events called Design-A-Longs( DALs). Those events were where most of the pieces shown in this book were created. This is the story of our maiden DAL voyage.
A few months before Knitwear Design Workshop was released, one of my students started an online group for people to come together to knit and discuss my designs. Although I had a large body of published work, I had no prior knowledge of the group being formed. You can imagine both my surprise and joy when I received an invitation to join. Since it was newly forming, the direction that it would take was open, and that founding student, who was also the moderator, welcomed my input. When planning for the book release, I had been busily exploring ways to invite knitters to join me online to experience design. As luck would have it, the newly formed group was the perfect platform for launching a worldwide design event. Therefore, plans got underway for the first DAL.
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