Wool & Chile
Today is the beginning of a new chapter for me. For almost 10 years I have published knitting patterns and managed my social media -including my Ravelry and Etsy accounts as Black Sheep Creative Studio. I loved that name. My daughters helped me pick it out when they were very little. The black sheep has always appealed to me. The metaphors, the nursery rhymes - and the beautifully colored wool. My good friend Jeanne designed the original logo (which I'm still super attached to).
But it was time to update my brand. Something that was not so much a creative whim, but a description of who I am now, and what influences my designs and sensibilities.
A brand new brand that would make a bold statement about me - and my love for wool, all things hand made and natural colors. A brand that would explain why my culture has literally embedded a love of fiber arts, and artesanias (all things handmade), deep into my DNA.
Wool & Chile is almost a year in the making. It came to me, as most life-altering decisions can, in a dream. A dream I had after a long and thoughtful conversation with a fellow knitter on Instagram about craft and culture, assimilation and more serious subjects. It was then I decided that it was time to take action on what I'd been thinking about for months.
I needed a new brand to honor the women I learned my crafts from - and the ones that showed them how to handle yarn and create beautiful items meant to be strictly utilitarian.
Maybe it's no coincidence that I was born right where Atecs grew multi-colored cotton, and indigo. Indigo, which was brought to the American South from Mexico and South America by the original colonizers - now grows wild in my coastal Georgia front yard! It's a living connection to the land I'm from, and a dye my ancestors most certainly used, long before it was coveted by colonizers and forced to be grown by the American slave.
(By the way, this is a great page to find out about the natural dyes used in the beautiful state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The information is by Norma Schaefer and has been printed int he NY Times, too).
Wool & Chile's goal is to continue to document all of the things I love. But to also promote the important role my culture and artistic ancestral connections play in my design choices.
So from a discussion, a dream, and my own history, I bring you... Wool & Chile.
