JOURNAL: JELLINA VERHOEFF
Crochet and colour – approaching creativity from di erent angles with designer Jellina Verhoe
I’ve long been an admirer of the stunning geometric and colourful designs by Jellina Verhoeff of Jellina Creations. Recently I spoke with her and everything she said resonated with me – from how she began with a granny square blanket about ten years ago, to how she started a blog because ‘that’s what people did back then’, to how she began writing patterns because she couldn’t make out existing ones. We both fell in love with crochet, colour, design, blogging and the wonderfully supportive craft community. She shared with me her thoughts on life as a designer and approach to shape and colour.
THE TWO SIDES OF CROCHET DESIGN
Jellina designs both for herself and as commissions for others such as Scheepjes (who she blogs for) and finds that her approach and thought process is entirely different depending on who the design is for. For a commissioned design there is often a brief that she must meet. Whether that brief is a theme, a colour, a yarn or a mixture of all three, the design process begins with these specifications and works backwards from there. When designing for herself though, Jellina lets her feelings speak. She takes a yarn that feels ‘right’ and plays with stitches and colour until it makes her happy. She just creates.
There is little planning, and the design evolves whilst it is being crocheted. The risk is that a design may not work, but we should take a leaf from her book because she is willing to take a risk for the beauty and freedom of expression that it brings!
COMING AT IT FROM ALL ANGLES
The things that strike me most about Jellina’s creations are her expressive use of colour, and masterful use of simple shapes to create complex patterns. Even as a youngster, she remembers geometry as her favourite subject at school and practised drawing shapes over and over. Jellina finds that repetition of these shapes to create a complex pattern is all around us, we just have to be open to seeing it! In her work delivering post she will often take pattern inspiration from a garden path, the old-fashioned tiles next to a front door, or the shapes that nature gives us too. These flashes of inspiration become an intricate design that is simple in its parts but appears hugely complicated and mesmerising when she adds colour!
THE ART OF COLOUR
In her work as a Scheepjes blogger Jellina had the amazing opportunity to design her own version of Our Tribe yarn. There are two things to state about this. Firstly, the thought of
designing your own yarn makes us all ridiculously jealous and secondly, she has a rare talent for choosing colours that really work. When I asked Jellina how she goes about the colour choice process she simply told me that they need to ‘feel good together’. The theory of combining and balancing colours is widely written about but nothing can be better than a set of colours that speak to you, and Jellina thinks the key to this is practise and experimentation. Often, she finds that just playing with yarn from her stash is the way to start so that you can see how the shades work together before committing to start a project. For Jellina, choosing colours is as an important a part of the process and she makes sure she enjoys every step of it.
ENJOYING EVERY PART OF THE PROCESS
For Jellina, the art of design, shape, colour, creation, it is all part of a process that you need to enjoy every step of the way. She believes that by focussing on each aspect of your creation you can get so much more satisfaction from it. Like anything in life, it’s not just about the finished piece you end up with but the journey you take to get to it. So take your time to pick out your pattern and enjoy matching your yarn to it. Smile at the stitches you frog when you find you messed up a few rows back (I must admit I may find this challenging!), weave in those ends like they are the most important part of it and then sit back and admire your creation from every angle.
Written by Hannah Cross