Kathy Merrick

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Kathy's wonderful crochet designs stand proudly on the cusp of art and fashion.  In this lively interview, she shares her background, influences and thoughts on crochet today.

DORA:  Tell me about how your interest in crochet first began.

KATHY:  My grandmother crocheted a lot. She did knit but did much more crochet.  When I was very small I asked her to teach me but it was hard,  I was very left-handed. She tried sort of, but then she would mutter under her breath -- "the devil" and then say "it's all twisted!" and give up in frustrations.  So I learned to knit first.  I always liked the ease of crochet so I taught myself how to do it out of a book backwards. I started knitting years before, at age12, and learned crochet at the end of high school.

DORA:  Where is your family from?

KATHY:  My parents are first generation Americans.  My mother's family was from Poland,  and my Dad's Irish and German.  

DORA:  I'm a first generation American too. My mom is Belgian and my father German, but all my grandparents were from Poland. The Jews of tha era were confined to Polish ghettos, but I don't even know if it was Poland then -- part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  

KATHY:  My grandmother's family were probably Jews several generations ago.  They're from the part of Poland that went back and forth with Lithuania.

DORA:  Well, there are lots of needle arts in that area.

KATHY:  Yes, and when it's cold you have to entertain yourself.

DORA:  But what did our grandmother crochet?

KATHY:  She didn't really make crochet clothing.  She made mostly table covers, and and she was fond of making trim for linens. She ironed pajamas and underwear!

DORA:  Where did you grow up?

KATHY:  Philadelphia.  I've lived in Providence RI, also in New York.  My ex-husband went to grad school at Brown so when we first got married we lived in Providence.  Then he worked in New York at NYU and we lived there.  Now he lives in Virginia.  When we got separated I moved back here.  I worked for Liza Prior Lucy -- she started out as a knitting designer but now she does patchwork.  She' s Kaffe Fassett's partner.  When I left home I ended up at Liza's for a while.

DORA:  When was that?

KATHY:  About 3 years ago. It's been a period of enormous upheaval for me.  

DORA:  I've had a couple of husbands myself, but I don't plan to do that again.

KATHY:  I don't understand serial marriers.

DORA:  Where did you go go college?

KATHY:  La Salle College in Philadelphia.  I studied French.

DORA:  Vous parlez francais?

KATHY:  Un petit peu.

DORA:  How did you get into designing?

KATHY: I used to work a long time ago at the Tomato Factory Yarn Company in Lambertville, NJ.  They were famous for starting Alice Starmore in her North American fame.  At the same time Liz Dougherty, the owner at the time, encouraged pattern designing by all her employees. We did kits: you buy the yarn, you get the pattern. Later on, three of us moved across the street to our own yarn store called Simply Knit.  We started out designing for David Codling -- he's part part of Unicorn Books. They did several Shetland knitting books.  After that somebody told me that Interweave was starting a crochet magazine and I should send them something.  I sent Pam Allen a couple of things and she bought the first thing I sent.

DORA:  Awesome!  Did you know you could design, or was it a surprise to you?

KATHY:  I've always been a seat of the pants designer.  I had art in high school but have no formal training at all.  I like to make stuff, I've always done that.  I used to sew a lot but I don't anymore.  You have to be neat and perfect in sewing and that's not me.  One of the things I like about yarn art is there's a lot more fudging involved.

DORA:  Interesting. Tomato Factory was a shop?

KATHY: Yes. It started out with two partners, but they split, one took wholesale, the other retail, with Alice Starmore yarn.

DORA:  Did your sewing background help you understand how to put a crochet garment together?

KATHY:  Definitely. You can visualize how the pieces are put together.  I don't like complicated instructions.  I'm a big fan of simplifying not the design, but how to do what I did.  For example  I'm making a vest and it has to zip up the front.  It has a band with a separating zipper.  Just inside the front band is going to be a narrow, very tight ruffle.  If you sew, you understand that despite the fact that you have some knitting left, you're better of putting in your zipper in first.  Sewing background is helpful in a lot of ways.

DORA: I wish I had more of that!  So back to your career:  publishing in Interweave was your breakthrough?

KATHY:  Pretty much at the same time something else happened. I worked at Glorious Color for Liza Lucy --  she runs a fabric business from her home.  I was her minion for 5 years.  She used to do a lot with Vogue Knitting because she was desining knitwear and she was the East Coast rep for Rowan Yarns.  She knew Trisha Malcolm.  This was when they first started doing Knitting on the Go books. Trisha was doing a crochet hat book and didn't have enough hats.  Liza said to me  "You've got to to do this right now!"  She's my mother duck and my mentor   I have 5 hats in that book.  It kind of just fell in my lap.

DORA:  I remember those hats, they're great!  You were there at the right time. You kept working for both outfits after that, Vogue and Interweave.

KATHY:  Especially Interweave, because they do more crochet.  In the past I've done the sort of thing where there'd be phone call from the yarn editor of Vogue, when they were still doing Family Circle.  She sent me already manufactured garments and she wanted part of that switched into crochet -- like take out the yoke and put in crochet instead, and have it done in four days.  

DORA:  You prefer to design crochet or knitting?

KATHY: I actually love both. To tell you the truth, part of the reason I do so much crochet is there's so much less competition. There are so many knitting designers who do amazing incredible things, but far fewer crocheters who do wonderful things.

DORA:  I agree.  I started out just making things for myself that I want to wear.  My first designs were bought by Jean Leinhauser, who publishes mass market crochet, but at that moment she was looking for fashionable, high end stuff.  But the pressure to turn into a mass market designer is so intense. I've decided to stick with what I do, and have cut out some income streams because of that.

KATHY:  I understand completely.  By the second issue of Interweave Crochet Judy Swartz, who was the editor at that point, bought a colorwork hat made with Rowan wool cotton. She said, "I want the hat but could you do it in Lion Brand?"  I sweated for half a day, and then I gritted my teeth and emailed her to say, "I don't approve.  The hat is really beautiful in Rowan Yarn, if that means you don't want to buy it, that's the way it is."  To my great surprise she said OK, never mind.  

DORA:  Yes, sometimes editors are receptive. 

KATHY: There are not enough days in your life to make stuff you don't like.  Once you agree to that, you can't say, "I'm sorry, I only like natural fibers, or I don't do novelty yarn."  Now it's at the point where people don't ask me to do things I don't want to do anymore.

DORA:  That's great, that's where you want to be, right?

KATHY: I don't have a problem with switching yarns, and don't have a huge ego.  But I have this one particular line that I'd rather not cross.

DORA:  How do you manage to make living -- can you do it just designing?

KATHY:  No. The reason I can do what I do is because of my ex-husband.  Even with royalties -- I get royalties form Interweave, they have a very generous arrangement for designers.  Like that crazy Babette Blanket, I get a lot of royalties from that.  We'll see how many books I'll sell.  The truth is, you need another source of income.

DORA:  Well, you know I am a voice teacher.  My performing life is largely behind me.

KATHY:  I'm the only one in my family who doesn't play an instrument.  All my four brothers play instruments!  

DORA: I do half a living with voice teaching, and the rest with crochet.  It's building, and I do a lot of writing.

KATHY:  It's hard to have the one pathway when you're in fiber arts. It's impossible, simply because it takes so much time.  Unles you can be a wholesale distributor like Liza. She does books and has a fabulous fabric business on line. 

DORA: It builds very slowly, but it does build, if you have the talent and stick with it.

KATHY: I'm in the process of doing a website.  I'm going to attempt to sell some finished pieces. I really like making stuff.  Playing with yarn is just as riveting every single day.

DORA: I see some beautiful stuff on etsy.  Mostly not Americans doing that.  Let me ask you about Babette Blanket.  When I first joined ravelry it was all over the place!  I thought it was great.  In my review of your book I said Babette Blanket "nurtured a whole generation of crochet colorists"  which I think is true.  People did such beautiful jobs with it, and they were all different.

KATHY:  When you're in the yarn business or design business, you come across people who are afraid to use colors. They need someone to tell them this goes with this, this goes with that. I must tell you that the color wheel stuff bores me.  My favorite thing to do is just go take colors until they look good together.   

DORA:  Other people can't necessarily see it the way you do, though.  It's like being musical.

KATHY: I guess you're right.  An important exercise to do if you haven't done a lot  with color is to go to one of my favorite places, the embroidery thread counter.  Start with colors you don't like, and see what you have to do to make them work. I started color work with Kaffe Fassett. Liza got Kaffe interested in patchwork.  She took some of his knitted patterns and made patchwork pieces to entice him into doing patchwork. Then he said we should turn our ideas into crochet.  He and I started with 40 colors of Appleton crewel.  That's what the first Babette was made with -- it's itchy scratchy Appleton crewel.

DORA:  People learned a lot from that project.

KATHY: I think it's appeal is the modular construction, so you can figure things out as you go along.  I love to go to ravelry and look at them. I have seen some that are nothing like mine.  One of my favorites is off white, some shades of grey, a little bit of brown -- no color.  It's fantastic! They've sold 8000 copies of the pattern.

DORA:  You should be a rich woman!  

KATHY: Not when you get 40 cents on the pattern.  But they have an excellent deal.  There are people who are vociferous about how they're getting cheated, but we can't say that about interweave.  They give you a great number of choices. 

DORA: And if you want to make an equally wonderful pattern and sell it yourself you can make lots of money.

KATHY: Not what I want to do though.

DORA: Well, maybe if your website really gets going.  The other design of yours that's very poplar is Boteh Scarf.  Tell me about it.

KATHY:  One of the things that's awesome about crochet is shaping by changing the height of stitches, it's so much easier than in knitting.  You can fiddle around till it looks like something.  That's what I did.  I connected it up the side and it started to look like a paisley.  On the first one I miscalculated and it came out like a spiral instead of a straight line.  So I realized when I flipped it, it came out a straight line.

DORA: Cool.  So you spend a lot of time experimenting.

KATHY: I do, I work most days, even if it's not something I get paid for.  Frequently it might be a detail of something I've seen,  and I want to try to do it in crochet. The first Boteh I made with Habu stainless steel,  two shades of silver/grey. But using something like that is a publication problem  The published version was done with Lorna's Laces sock yarn. It's more flabby. It's interesting because the two versions look very different but both are appealing. Like my beloved embroidery floss, I've only sold one thing out of it.  

DORA: In the soho hat book!

KATHY: Yes.  One of my favorite things to do is tie pieces of embroidery floss all together in a ball, and then you forget what you did, so it's always a suprise and makes it exciting.

DORA: I did something like that on my website for a Tunisian Jacket.

KATHY: That Tunisian Jacket is awesome.

DORA: Thanks!  I tried to give a tutorial on how to pick the colors.  But very few people made that jacket.  

KATHY: That's a perfect example.  People balk if you say buy 40 different colors of embroidery floss and put them together.  That hat had to have a formula, putting the exact order of the colors.  Otherwise people have problems with it.

DORA:  This is one of my fantasies.  I think there are many fearful people in the crafts, and also many creative ones.  I keep thinking about having a retreat where it's more about creativity.

KATHY: There's so many things you can't sell to a large audience because of those restrictions. I understand a lot of people don't have the accumulation tof yarn that I do.  The first time I met Kaffe Fassett, I had to shake my finger at him because I made one of his old triangle scarves. It had a lot of colors and  there were two different balls you had to buy, and they used 6 st on the front and 6 on the back.  When he's working, he sits on the floor surrounded by his stuff, and he takes a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There are people who'd like to do that but can't, and you can't expect people to buy 35 skeins of Koigu.  But you and I know you can make a heck a lot of stuff from that. You need that depth of color to really do something with.

DORA: I often don't, I leave that part out becuase it's too difficult to do it for publication.  

KATHY: That's what gets me all fired up, when you can play with color.

DORA:  That's why you did the book, right?

KATHY: I'm very close to Kim Werker and I said to her, "What do you think of this idea for a book where you would make stuff that has to be beautiful but also has to be useful?"  It can't just be things you would make that you could say "Oh my God that's a beautiful work of art but I could never wear it outside of the house."  Kim said, I think you need to meet Tricia Waddell .  The next day she emailed me and by the next week we had a deal.  Tricia is really good -- she take this little idea and makes it into something.  What I think about is projects themselves, I don't do the thematic thing.  But she managed to turn what I said into something thematic.  She said, "I realize you keep coming back to color combinations, so why not make it a book about that?"

DORA: That's a smart brain there.

KATHY: Yeah, she's really good at that.  I enjoyed working with her. When people say I really like your style, my reaction is " What? I don't have a style.  I just do what appeals to me." To have someone put that into words, what they think your style is, that was a revelation to me.

DORA: How would you now define your style?

KATHY: I try to do a decent cross between art and fashion. I'm better at toning down the art a little so that it's something you can actually wear.  I like simpler techniques combined with a lot of color.

DORA: I say that in my review too.  What I see as your style is understaed elegance.  I mean that in the most complimentary way, what one thinks of as European style.

KATHY: I appreciate that incredibly.  That's what I tried to do.

DORA: Well, you did it!  You have a great design eye.  I saw that you spent some time in Milan?

KATHY: My ex-husband was in international financial futures business.  For the past 10 years he's been teaching.  He was at Baruch College.  In the summer he would teach at Bocconi University, the financial college in Milan.  We went at least once a year for many years.  I spent a lot of time in Italy and love it.

DORA: I'm a big Italophile too.  Though now that I've been to the Balkans, that's another favorite place for me.  I used to go regularly when I was touring.  I love Umbria, Tuscany, the Como region.

KATHY: We used to go a lot when we were in Milan.  If it was hot, we'd get on the train and go to Bellaggio, and Varenna.  I'm very fond of Siena.

DORA: That art there is to die!

KATHY: The light in Italy is fantastic.  The light in Scotland is great too.

DORA:  You've travelled there too?

KATHY: Yes, including a couple of weeks in Shetland, one of the best places I've ever been.  It's hard to believe that a place with no trees could be so breathtakingly beautiful.

DORA: Did you learn about the knitting traditions? 

KATHY: I went on a trip with a friend of mine, David Codling. He was publishing books and wholesaling Jamieson yarns.  We got to go the mill and we got to do several workshops with knitters.  It's a hotbed of knitwear design. This tiny little pace where people do amazing things.  For example, Wilma Malcolmson, she's big in the Fair Isle businss.  I saw a couple of young art school types who were doing fantastic things.  

DORA:  That would make a great craft tour, wouldn't it?

KATHY: Especially if you could combine it with Edinburgh. In Edinburgh there's stuff everywhere.  In the Ragamuffins they sell a lot of handmade items.  You see these labels with people you've never heard of and you wonder, why can't I buy this in North America?

DORA:  That sounds great.  Let me go back to the book.  The Blocks Jacket in intarsia, are you carrying yarn all the time?

KATHY: No, what I did was I crocheted a sample square, then I just kept cutting pieces about the same length so I wouldn't have 8 or 12 balls that would cross each other.

DORA: Yeah I hate that stuff.

KATHY: Me too.  There's so much preparatory work by the time you get into it you've worked so hard.  If you confine yourself to fairly large, regular things, it's a lot more appealing. And Cascade 220 comes in so many colors.  

DORA: I want to talk to you about that tuffet! That is so great.  Was it a pain to make?

KATHY:  I'm the wrong person to ask because I love solving a problem.  Susan Druding who owns Crystal Palace yarns is incredibly generous with yarn.  I had some balls of that Deco Ribbon, and it's not something I'd knit with, but it comes in so many smashing colors. The balls are small so you could have a lot of color. There was a directive to have garments, accessories and some home items.  With home items there are blankets and pillows, you could make lots of those.  I thought even though the tuffet was silly, if you could make it work it would be fun. You make the circular top and the rectangular side but it's really the same thing.  On the top the motifs all go the same direction, but on the side every other one is reversed.  so you get a totally different look.  I'm told that people at Interweave squealed when they opened the box.

DORA:  I bet! What's it stuffed with?

KATHY: A couple bags of fiberfill.  That way you could control the compression.  The only way it could work is if you really really stuff it, otherwise it's just a flabby thing.  You have to put some in before you put the top on, then you sew it some more and stuff it some more.  At the end, you really stuff it in when you put on the last bit of the top.

DORA: It was smart to use ribbon yarn so it won't stretch.

KATHY: Yes, it held its shape well. I'm usually a fan of skinny yarns and big needles, but this needed to be tight.

DORA: What else I really like in the book is, wherever you do something that's like lace, you give it a modern slant. I think that's so difficult.  I don't use plain stitches so much. I love what you do with them, but for me, I'm just so attracted stitch patterns.  But when you use them, the item gets a certain look -- it looks Victorian or it looks seventies.  I'm constantly thinking about how to do take beautiful stitch patterns and make them look contemporary and hip.  And you did it.  Like that Butterfly Turtle neck.

KATHY: Thanks. That's a stitch I always liked.  I have a problem with an entire garment made of it, because you're confined by boxes, or you have to cheat the pattern to make it fit.  So I like to confine the fancy stitching to trim or to details.    The yarn I used made such a beatiful fabric. I admired that butterfly stitch but it's a little stiff. The yarn from Crystal Palace, Panda Silk, made it work because it's so soft

DORA: The collar on the bright yellow cardi, I loved that.  I was suprised when I saw what the stitch pattern was.

KATHY: I found something like it in a really old book, but there it was staggered every row in multiple colors.  It was cheesy.  But I liked the way the slight fans are compressed becasue you do the V's in the row below.  If you don't stagger them and do them in one color it looked completely different.

DORA: I thought, how did she do that? This is interesting because it shows how you work, how you see something and then you play with it and it becomes something very different.

KATHY: It's hard for me to talk about the design process because a lot of what I do, that's how it works.

DORA: There are a few people who design a whole thing in their heads, but I dont visualize that way.  Some people have such an architecutral brain, like Doris Chan, Roby Chachula and Jennifer Hansen.  You can really see that in their work.  I have to have it my hands play with the swatch, hold it on my body, see how it falls.

KATHY: Lots of times what I end up with is not what I started, either because it didn't work, or I had a better idea.  Sometimes I start with a clear idea in my head, but not often. 

DORA:  I love that wonderful scarf from your book that's all in chain lace.

KATHY: That's everybody's favorite project, which is interesting because it's incredibly simple.  I'm not sure it would be as effective in yarn that's not so superbly colored.

DORA: Yeah, that worries me sometimes, when we make these designs that are built around a yarn, and other people can't always get it.

KATHY: That's true.  The other thing about that design is it's all chains.  If you blocked it, it would be completely different. It's the combination of the number of colors, the fact that they're stippled, and that the lace isn't blocked.  That's by far the design most people have talked about.

DORA: I'd put all the ones I mentioned as my favorites.  I love the hat with the pleats on one side.  Where do you see the crochet world now?

KATHY:  With some care it could stay more popular longer if you can do things that are chic.  One of the reasons I like things that are simpler and done in color is they don't need to scream their time period. It might not end up 10 or 20 years later with someone wearing it because It's ironic, it's something I detest.  It takes an awful lot more work to get to that point.  People have to be encouraged.  People who have ideas who are not necessarily in the field.  I like that nowadays you can send your stuff to the magazines, and you don't have to have a name to get your stuff published.  People need their conceptions changed -- they crochet is either lace or big heavy clunky stuff .  People have to play around with it until there's something that everybody likes.  There aren't that many things as in knitting.

DORA:  Is that the nature of crochet?

KATHY:  Honestly I think you can do as much with crochet as knitting. I prefer it.  You have to get rid of a lot of ideas, the big one being that the weight of yarn is comparable. What you knit with goes up in thickness when you crochet it.  Fingering yarn is DK when you crochet it, and DK is worsted.  Some Aran style crochet sweaters don't work because they're made in worsted. Another bad idea is that you use the same size hook as if you were knitting.  You've got to do worsted with 6 mm hook.  A lot of crochet doesn't work because is it's too cute and too gimmicky.  It's as if crochet has a category in every age -- like right now it's amigurumi.  People will look back  and say, crochet was all about that. Just like years ago they thought crochet was about hideous blankets.

DORA:  Luckily there are some very good crochet designers working in the field now.

KATHY:  There are a lot of people who are brilliant.

DORA:  It's a chicken and egg thing, a lot of people with that talent get pushed into dumbing down.  Some people I mentor had designs bought, and immediately were pushed into dumbing them down.  

KATHY:  Too often the publishers think well, that really sold well so let's make another one just like that.

DORA:  New designers get all their creativity stamped out.  I do see more interest from the TNNA yarn companies, and that's encouraging.

KATHY:  Yes, I'm starting to work with Universal Yarn. The thing I miss the most is feedback.  You know how it is, you're right there on top of something and you can't really decide if it's really good.

DORA:  I always hate an item when I finish it, because it's not what I imagined.  

KATHY: Every once in a while it would be nice to have someone to bounce off of.

DORA: I'd love to do that for you!

KATHY: I can send you stuff?  

DORA: I could use the same thing.  I have several swatches for something I'm working on, I can't tell which is the best.

KATHY: It's very hard.  It keeps you from being influenced by others.  But you don't get feedback on a design till it's finished.

DORA:  Well, we can do that for each other, I'd love that!