Charlotte’s first hand-knit socks. Photo by Felicia Lo
Last year, we began a wonderful journey into exploring our monthly SweetGeorgia yarn and fibre club offerings more deeply with Rachel Smith and Katrina Stewart. Each month, these fabulous knitters and spinners would spin, knit, design, and create the most lovely things to share with our community. This year, Rachel and Katrina will be continuing to develop their projects but will alternate with each other in spinning the monthly fibres. This month, we welcome our own SweetGeorgia team member, Charlotte Lee as a new contributor to our monthly club exploration posts. Thank you so much to Charlotte for knitting and writing her first installment for the Sock Yarn Club!
If you have not yet had the opportunity to meet Charlotte, well, I would like to try to introduce her to you, just a little. But honestly, it’s hard to find the words to describe how deeply blessed we feel that Charlotte is on our team. She designed the colourway for our December 2016 Club and you can read a little bit of her story from her point of view. But from our point of view, we also collectively feel like it was just a wonderful thing that Charlotte came to join us at the studio.
Charlotte came to us as a recent grad from the animation program at Emily Carr but it was apparent that she was interested in expressing her creativity through more than just pixels. She was an avid crocheter and knitter and over the years, she has shown us not only how quickly she can turn yarn into garments, but how her generosity, warmth, and positive perspective simply makes both celebrations and challenges so much better. Charlotte might go home on Friday afternoon with a bundle of skeins and return the next week with a completed sweater. Or she might turn a basketful of seconds yarns into twenty handknit hats for the homeless. She might learn to spin, one lunch hour at the studio, and then come back to show us her beautifully spun and finished skeins in a short while. These are all true stories.
Initially, Charlotte joined the studio as a dyer but quickly began to help out with everyone, doing whatever she could to help improve things at the studio. The fact that we can find test skeins that we dyed several years ago is likely attributed to the fact that Charlotte organized them all. Today, Charlotte hosts our monthly evening knit and spin nights at the studio (last Thursday of every month from 7 to 9 pm!) and has recently been made our Assistant Production Manager.
In the photo at the top, these are Charlotte’s first pair of hand-knit socks. Of course, for her first sock project ever, she chose to do colorwork. That’s the kind of thing that I can see Charlotte doing. Big heart, big dreams, and lots of knitting. I’m looking forward to seeing how Charlotte interprets our monthly Club colourways through her personal crafty lens.
If you would like to follow Charlotte and see what she’s making, you can find her on Instagram here at @charlotte_milkteacup ยป