The Meaning of Creativity

I find it fascinating to talk with other designers and ask them what makes them tick, what drives their internal engines to create and keep creating even in the face of self-doubt and frustration. The answers I get always lean towards an insatiable desire to put to real form what they’re seeing and feeling inside.

I went to a workshop yesterday for the Day Job in which there were two speakers giving a dual presentation, one talking about linear perspective (from the point of view of an artist) and one on how the human eye perceives perspective (from a scientific point of view). Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly as I loved science in high school), I made the greatest connection with the scientific end of the conversation when the second speaker posted a photograph of someone’s pupil from the outside looking in. [Imagine a large circle filled with bright light and all around it dark brownish-red looking muscles surround it.] It was rather eery! I felt like I had traveled to an unrecognizable world I never thought I’d see. No, really. It was quite…humbling.

Anyway, the speaker was driving home the point that the human eye sees things backwards as it’s taken in and is reflected in the brain in order to look right side up, and that the world as seen is really quite orderly and beautiful. All things made from nature are so well designed. Think of a nautilus shell, or the structure of a beetle’s body. Or even the way a line of trees appear smaller as they go back in space and yet the trees furthest away aren’t necessarily smaller than those in front.

For me I took from that conversation that the world is indeed orderly, but people and our thoughts, visions, and ideas are more chaotic, raw. Our insatiable need to design and always move forward is like a constant need to take the chaos of our daily lives and inside our brain and make order of it in the physical sense, take the orderliness of what we see in the world and reflect it back through our own senses, our own eyes.

The Creative Process

I posted a question to yesterday asking designers (knit and crochet):

“Looking through inspirational images & yarn stash to determine next project. DESIGNERS: How do you get inspired?”

I would say a lot of my designing is a reflection of my environment, of what I like. I’m a beach person by nature having grown up at the Jersey Shore. I tend to like a more subtle, subdued color palette. As such, I’ve created a lot of designs that evoke that part of my personality. My latest design is no exception.

My response to the question I posed on Twitter was that I rummage through my yarn stash to see what I currently have and find images that inspire me at the moment. I knew I wanted to make a large handbag that I could take to the beach, whose design was easy enough manipulate in order to change the size of the bag easily, if a customer desired to do it. And I wanted to play with a new fiber. I happened to have several spools of Berwick Wraphia in Oatmeal, Green, and Turquoise I had purchased a couple years ago online and that seemed to fit the profile.

I went searching online for some cool Amy Butler (love her aesthetic!) fabric on fabric[dot]com to go with the feeling of the bag (but not match it perfectly) when I found this one (shown below). Something about the playfulness of the flowers, the use of color, and the fact that it was called, “August Fields” and my birthday is in August drew my eye and I bought a yard of fabric.

I did some searching online for beach bags (regular ones, not crochet as I tend to look towards mainstream fashion first) and came across this bag which I thought was interesting. It had a knit-like appearance to it and I wondered about how that would translate to crochet. I like that the rows of stitches seemed to start at the center and radiate out and back in at the other end, creating a curved effect. I set out to mimic that effect.

In order to create the curved shape, I had to employ short rows and linked stitches (to join the short rows to the main body of the work). The bag had some stability to it but not like I had imagined. Later on in the design process, I used green wraphia and did some surface crochet to go over the portion of the bag with the short rows, adding structure to it. That solved one problem and helped along an aesthetic issue: before doing the surface crochet, the curved shape wasn’t as pronounced. Now it was.

The remainder of the design, done in turquoise wraphia, came from seeing embroidery on off-white Mexican style, beachy shirts I used to see women wear to the beach as a child.

Lastly, the name: I wanted something that took someone to a certain time and connected them with a certain feeling. Montauk is a beachy place that boasts both a casual and upscale lifestyle, and that’s what I wanted to bag to feel like: polished, fun, but functional.

And that’s how a big bag called, “Montauk” was “born.”

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Tags: amy butler, bag, bamboo, Crochet, design, fabric, montauk handbag, pattern, purse