Whilst here in the UK we may have been experiencing the hottest week of the year so far, the first few days of September will always be synonymous for me with an energising crispness in the air, a compulsion to pull up my socks and the anticipation that comes with sharpening pencils for a new school year. It still astonishes me how deep-rooted in my psyche is the feeling of back to school. In reality September rarely is a clear turn of the season, often being filled with more predictably warm, sunny days than the holiday months of July or August. But no matter how different my routine, where am I in a project or what the next few months of my calendar look like there’s a bittersweet urge to prioritise work.
Whilst the adage goes to make hay while the sun shines, I find working in summer to be like walking through treacle, a frustrating mix of out of office replies, mill closures, and a general lethargy born out of doom-scrolling through everyone else’s vacation highlight reels on Instagram. I wish I could remember this earlier in the year and plan in some time off or out, essential R&R that I have always found to be nigh on impossible to take as a creative freelancer, or that’s what I have told myself. Despite the lack of a real break, or even much of a pause, the first days of September appear like a shot in the arm, shiny shoes, and a new satchel. It’s a beginning of sorts, a clean slate, a blank canvas. The time for review and categorising is past, and what awaits is all fresh and sparkly, or at the very least it has the potential to be. It doesn’t matter how you got here, only that you are here. It’s an opportunity for reinvention and it can be invigorating. That feeling of expectation tinged with just a little anxiety is (for me at least) a catalyst to just do it.
Somewhere in between the tension of advocating for slower and more considered practices and the reality of working to other people’s deadlines, small rituals become signifiers of time and pace. More often than not the research, ideas and exploration phase of a project is the one that requires the most dedicated time but that gets the least allotted to it. It’s a hard one to justify to the accountants as the return is somewhat unquantifiable. So, the inevitably more playful activities I tend to push out into the evenings and weekends. But the essential creative responsibilities of listening, looking, reading, and yes even knitting and drawing I have been trying to reclaim in working hours and incorporate more into my every day. On a micro level I believe it helps me to make better work and on a macro level it’s about creating a company culture for myself and Bella that we would want to be a part of if we were working for someone else. When your passion becomes your livelihood, the boundaries are blurred at best, and in my experience almost entirely dissolved, so enjoying what you do and how you do it is kinda the whole point.
Back to sharpening those pencils. Preferably 2B, for the perfect smooth softness on the page, but hard enough to be crisp and definite, and not too smudgy. More than a habit, this is one of those rituals that helps to set out the course of a new design project from the very beginning. And more than that, the pure joy of holding a pencil in your hand, freshly sharpened, the balance of it as it rests between your thumb and forefinger and the first sweep of a line on the page, translated directly and immediately from the mind’s eye, simply cannot be overstated. As one of the first stages of my design process, I try to hold on to that sense of playfulness and looseness of expression that we encourage in children when drawing. Ideas can be honed, modified, and finalised later, they will eventually be moved around, turned upside down and taken apart, but for now anything goes, and this is a method rather than a conclusion. The making of marks on paper is both basic and transcendent, the convergence between the manual and the cerebral.
Decades of working with mills, manufacturers, and makers overseas, with whom I did not share a spoken or written language (other than a few technical terms too specialised for a translator to pick up!) taught me the merits of drawing as a mode of design communication. In the past it was via fax machine, with alterations and additions whirring and whining their way through the ether and onto rolls of paper in the middle of the night, and now of course it’s much simpler and more immediate in the palm of one’s hand. Nuances can be achieved with a drawn line that would not be visible in a photograph, fully fashion marks can be exaggerated, and a three-needle cast off detail on a shoulder seam described with a little squiggle. These shorthand gestures become a language in themselves, a vertical line of repeating ‘v’s to symbolise stocking stitch, or rows of joined up ‘m’s for garter stitch. The slight wiggle of a line that rather than being an imperfection, serves to provide an impression of the drape of the fabric, the thickness of a line the weight of a yarn. It’s all there in black and white.
Timeframes can be tightened, briefs narrowed, selections made, budgets cut, but in the process of design, the drawing stage is non-negotiable, being both the idea and the realisation, the method, and the madness. Within this humble lead pencil exists all hope, all possibility, all joy.