Culinary Colors

 

 
February/March 2008    
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What have you been up to since then?
We continued developing products under our corporate name, K1C2, LLC. Many of the products are sold today in national chain and independent yarn, sewing and craft stores. In late 2007 our first two Mary Ruth Show-Me-How craft books (knitting and quilting) for kids hit the stores and are doing quite well. Mary Ruth even has her own website at www.ShowMeHowCrafts.com.

After 12 successful years together, we have found that some of our individual interests drew us in different directions. We amicably decided to keep writing the Mary Ruth books together, but to follow our individual interests wherever they led us.

I hear you're back to teaching and designing. How rewarding is that for you?
Missing teaching so much was one of my main motivators in making the change in Susan’s and my business arrangement. One of the first things I did was to go see Lois Varga at my home knitting store, Anacapa Fine Yarns in Ventura and let her know I now had the time to teach a class. Her regular schedule was full, so we decided to try a class on Friday nights. To our surprise, it filled with a dozen eager students and I was back in my element. In fact, that first class was called Fits You To a Tee and was based on three patterns I had done for Knit One, Crochet Too. You can see Pattern 1010 (done in fabulous Ty-Dy yarn), the others and the class flyer at my website.

Another recent project I just finished uses short pieces of many yarns. I really had fun! There are only 72 stitches across the whole back. I wore it two weeks to the day after starting it. I made myself take the time to take pictures of the process. You can see them here.

What best describes your style of teaching?
Hmmm… I guess relaxed. I like it and have fun when I teach. I almost always can learn something from a class also. I’ve knitted so many stitches, taught so many classes and designed so many designs over the past five decades that I feel really happy to share. I especially like teaching and inspiring those new to our wonderful world of knit and crochet. I still get a thrill when I see the light go on in a student’s eyes.

You've authored a couple of books? Tell us more.
I mentioned the Mary Ruth books earlier. Susan and I also wrote Crochet Your Way in 2000, which still sells well and has become a reference book for crocheters.

Any more books in the works?
I have ideas, but not the time to develop them to the proposal stage right now. I found developing my website to be very similar to writing a book. I couldn’t find any other site that was similar to what I envisioned, so for the most part my builder and I were blazing new trails. I really wanted the site to be a place that I could share with others all the areas that interest me: knit and crochet; fitness and health; color and style; beading and jewelry; and sewing – whew  – it was like building five websites!

If you were to live to be 100, how would you plan on spending your time?
What a great question! I fully plan to live to be 100. I come from a very long-lived family. My mom just died three years ago at 96. I’m 70 now and that’s 30 more years to wallow up to my armpits in yarn, or beads or fabric or whatever else might catch my fancy between now and then!

Moving my studio to a room in my home has allowed me to spend more day time with my husband Jack than I had been able to do. I ran my second half-marathon in Anchorage Alaska in June 2007, celebrated my 70th birthday in November and took Ventura County Boot camp for women in December. I’ve recently read about something called Chi Walking and Running that I plan to investigate further. Has anyone tried it? If you have, let me know in the Fitness room on my website.

How do you satisfy your "creative tooth"?
It seems as if creativity starts when I open my eyes in the morning. I’ve always loved clothes so my first creative fun of each day is thinking about what I might wear. The day’s color combination can start with a forgotten tee shirt, or a pair of earrings or socks that are clamoring, “wear me, wear me!” and go from there.

Any tip you'd like to share?
Here is a knitting tip I share every chance I get. When I was supervising the designs at Cascade in the early ‘90s, Hélène did the technical editing on the patterns. One came back with a description for an ssk that I had never seen. At first I was just going to change it to what I was familiar with, but decided to try it as it was written first.

Well, I have to tell you, it is the slickest little ssk you’ve ever worked! Here it is: Ssk – knit into front of first st on LH ndl as if to knit and then into back of next st, k2tog. When I asked her where she had heard about it, she told me she just made it up one day trying to find an even easier way to work it.

What's your favorite Knit One, Crochet Too yarn?
That’s a hard one. It’s pretty hard for me not to name Douceur et Soie and Tartelette – I feel as if I’m their Mom! However, the Ty-Dy yarn is great – I have a lot of students using it. I recently used the new Babyboo. What a nice yarn – so soft and springy.

Last words?
Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk to you all about what I love so much, knitting and crochet. I hope to meet all of you in person in a class one day. In the meantime, do come visit and share with me at www.GloriaTracyDesign.com. I’ve provided a place in each room for you to tell me about you. I can’t wait to meet you all.

 

Knitorious
Designer, teacher, writer, fitness fan.
What DOESN'T she do?

Name: Gloria Tracy
Age: cutting edge of Boomerdom
Location: Port Hueneme, CA
Real Job: I count myself fortunate to say that I have been able to support myself by doing what I love for the last 17 years: developing products and designing, writing and teaching in the yarn, craft and sewing industries. My day job before all this fun was managing five locations for a national weight loss company.
Website: www.GloriaTracyDesign.com
How long knitting: I took knitting lessons at the Marshalltown, Iowa YMCA when I was in my early 20s. My main creative hobby at that time was sewing, but active sewing projects are just full of items that are not child friendly and I had two curious little kids. I’d always wanted to learn to knit and I thought it could be more easily contained. This was before I learned about obsessive stash!

Do you remember your first design?
I knitted mainly from patterns until 1988 when I stumbled upon Kaffe Fassett’s book Glorious Knits. That book literally changed my life. It inspired me to start combining my art, color, shape, yarn, and fabric loves with knitting and Yowee!! It all clicked!

(At right) is the sweater I was knitting when I got the book. The body was already done in shades of plain pink wool – geometric shapes following a graph. I finished the sleeves in Kaffe’s Carpet pattern shape with short pieces of the same plain pink wool. That was the first time I knitted without following a pattern. My life was forever changed! I was on a designing roll. Do you love those shoulder pads?!?

What drives your designs, where do you get your inspiration?
They have come from various sources over the years. Certainly in the beginning, Kaffe Fassett and his books were a great source of inspiration, as you can see by the pictures of my early designs. They were all take-offs of his charts and his first techniques of knitting with combinations of short pieces of many yarns. Sewing and knowledge of fitting together pattern pieces was a big help to my beginning design.

For color inspiration, I found it all around me. During the day I would drive between my five stores thinking about what colors and yarns I was going to combine when I got home. I was obsessed with it! I would see colors deep within what looked at first glance to be just dry shrubs. As I looked deeper, I could see all kinds of colors. Don’t forget that the yarns available in the late ‘80s were much more flat and with not even much texture. I would take plies out of multi-ply yarns to mix together to make new colors.

On August 4, 1990, I was driving up California Highway 1 on my way to see the buyer at the Phoenix gift shop at Nepenthe in Big Sur. The only other knitted garments they carried were Kaffe’s. The buyer had agreed to see my things! In my excitement, I was speeding. A light rain started. My car hit the mountain on one side, spun around and headed across the road toward a 400-foot cliff. One of the few short stone retaining walls on that stretch of highway caught the edge of my bumper and saved me! I was just banged up and bruised, but my car was totaled. I called my husband to come pick me up – AND to call the buyer to tell her why I would be late!

The result of this close call was that I made the decision to leave my day job to follow my bliss – to see if I could make my way as a designer. It didn’t take me long to realize that selling even fabulous one-of-a-kinds that take a month to make wasn’t the answer. I started presenting knit and crochet designs to the yarn companies and magazines. The rest, as they say, is history.

You were one of the original owners of Knit One, Crochet Too. How did this yarn company come about?
At a class I was teaching in Los Angeles in 1992, I had a student named Susan Levin. We hit it off and stayed in contact. I had done several patterns for Cascade Yarns and in 1993, they asked me to be their director of design. Susan had a background in graphic design and had done some original knit designs for her family. I commissioned her to do some of the graphic design for the 23 patterns books I did while I was with Cascade.

Susan and I felt our outlook on life, our values and what we wanted to do in business were compatible. When the opportunity presented itself in 1996, she and I started K1C2 and introduced the Knit One, Crochet Too yarn line.

Was designing a big part of your job at the yarn company?
Yes. We did two collections a year for the two yarn seasons. Each collection had 18 – 24 designs all in an easy-to-use format and in sizes 34” – 65”. I did the majority of the designs and working with the model makers. Susan was the one who took my often rough notes and created the really outstanding format of the patterns.

What led to your decision to sell Knit One, Crochet Too?
Susan and I also owned Rainbow Elastic, wrote Crochet Your Way, developed YarnBras, MagniClips magnifiers, Adornaments embellishing fibers and created the Rainbow Pick, Point & Match Color Selectors. This was like a whole separate company. Several of our notions products took off about the same time the knitting industry was taking off. In a nutshell, we couldn’t keep up with both parts of our company and do them justice. Only we could keep inventing new notions, so we decided to stay with that portion of our business. Our yarn company was mature enough that it could be continued by someone with knowledge of the industry. Hélène Rush, whom I had known since the Cascade days, was the perfect person. So in 2003, we sold the Knit One, Crochet Too yarn line to Hélène where it very successfully still lives on.


  

 

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Knit One, Crochet Too