KAT GOLDIN
Designer and blogger Kat Goldin explains how she fell in love with the beauty of the Scottish landscape and why it’s now her home.
So well did he fit his life into this place that he is remembered, even in the family, as having belonged here.” I got chills when I first read that quote from Wendell Berry. With both my husband and I being immigrants to the UK, the topic of ‘home’ circles around us, from well-meaning friends asking if we are going ‘home’ for Christmas to others we've just met asking if we'd ever move back ‘home’.
My answer to those questions is always the same. I tell people that I consider myself as having two great loves of my life: the first, a freckled South African with dark hair and blue eyes; and the second, the ragged, cold, wet country of Scotland. Though with Scotland there was no fear that I found it utterly annoying like I sometimes do with the South African boy!
HOME SWEET HOME
I fell in love with Scotland in a shopping mall, of all places. We’d visited a few times and I was interviewing for a job near Stirling, hoping to escape the south-east of England for somewhere with more green and fewer people. As I killed time waiting for my train, I wandered into the shopping centre.
A two-storey window met me at the top of the escalator, which framed the view of the incredible Ochil Hills as they jutted out majestically from the drained land, or ‘carse’, around it. Anywhere that could offer up views like that in the most mundane of places, was somewhere I knew that I’d find home.
SCOTTISH PALETTE
Whenever the inevitable topic comes up about what inspires me in my designs, the answer is always the same. I see myself endlessly re-interpreting those and other hills, and the sky and the sea and lochs that surround me with my hook or needles and yarn. I scour stitch dictionaries to find a pattern the matches the swath of grass I want to recreate, or the way the clouds split the light of the sun just before it rains. Ripples and shell shapes feature heavily, making and remaking lines of mountains and sea.
The colours are no different – the palette is just about as close to the Scottish landscape as I can get with yarns,
“The palette is as close to the Scottish landscape as I can get.”
“I use the landscape to dye my own wool.”
shifting subtly with the season. The blues and greys or the sky and water feature heavily, and that particular chartreuse green that the hills remain covered in most of the year, and the seaweed that lines the shore.
As the years pass, simply recreating the colours isn't enough and I have started using ingredients I find in the landscape to dye my own yarn, metaphorically infusing every stitch with ‘home’.
SHARING MY HOME
I don't want to make make any grandiose statements about crochet design, but it is the form in which I can tell you about my love of this place I call ‘home’. I get to carry pieces of my corner of the world all around the country when we go out to shows, and I get to see that exact line of mountain, sea and sky recreated in countless other places around the globe, reinterpreted again and again. I get to share ‘home’ with others.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever get tired of this place or if I will move on to some other source of inspiration. It’s possible, I suppose, to fall out of love like I fell in. But for now my goal is to simply become so much a part of it, that I’ll always be remembered as having belonged there.
See what Kat’s been hooking lately on her blog at www.slugsontherefrigerator.com. You can also sign up to one of her crochet workshops to learn how to make exquisite pieces using natural yarns.