Melody MacDuffie
Melody modeling her necklace
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An overlay piece in progress (front)
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An overlay piece in progress (back)
Kaleidoscope Necklace
Mexican Mandala Necklace
Tiger Eye Bracelet
"Life is about being eternally three—about being free to create exactly what I feel like creating exactly when I feel like creating it. That’s when I do my best work, and it’s where I take my greatest pleasure. It’s the big payoff. Money comes in a distant second. This has been worth changing the whole structure of my life for; worth living very simply for; worth experiencing an ongoing degree of financial insecurity for, one that nearly all of my friends (the exception being another artist) would find completely intolerable."
[Some months back I sent Melody a series of questions which she answered, most eloquently, by email; below is our exchange. Dora]
When did you begin to crochet?
My sister and I taught ourselves to crochet when I was 12. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair—I was obsessed by it from the first day.
How did your involvement with the craft evolve into the Overlay method? Where did you draw inspiration for your designs?
The long version? Well, I’d always felt tugged at by certain visual art forms, all of them symmetrical, repetitive, and very colorful. For example, I loved stained-glass rose windows, Islamic tiles, Buddhist sand mandalas, and the images seen through my kaleidoscope’s lens. Those were the kinds of images I wanted to create. And, so far, I hadn’t seen anything like them captured in crochet.
So I tried working in other media for awhile. But early on I was forced to accept what has turned out to be one of my life’s basic truths: that I was, and always would be, a hook-monger. This wasn’t something I could do anything about, so I might as well suck it up and start trying to find ways to make my medium produce results that would satisfy me. And this, I thought at first, would mean challenging the dominant traditions of the medium and transcending its “limitations.”
But it wasn’t until I began to understand that what was needed here was not a transcendence of limitations, but an exploration of infinite possibilities, that I began to see some progress.
In the meantime, I tried my own, very clumsy version of intarsia, changing colors as many as 20 times in a single row in my efforts to draw pictures with color. But it was a tedious, frustrating process, and afterwards I was stuck with hundreds of tails to weave in. Ugh!
Lacy doilies satisfied my cravings for repetitive patterns, but not for color. So I tried changing hues on every round, but the open spaces in the lace diluted the intensity of the colors, preventing me from achieving the densely saturated look I wanted.
My resistance to the typically horizontal or concentric look of much crochet led me to try vertical cables, which could be made to obscure, or at least distract from, the “striping” of the rows. But cable crochet is traditionally monochromatic. It’s about texture, not color.
My first significant step along the path to Overlay Crochet came when I tried making a cabled sweater in many shades of blue and green, working the rows vertically and changing colors on every row. Now this was better. But it was still no mandala.
Then one day I sat down with a box of brightly-colored sewing thread and a size “B” aluminum hook. I had been in the habit of leading with my left brain, thereby often getting in my own way, creatively speaking. But for some reason, this time I just picked up my hook and let happen whatever was going to happen. And what do you know? With very little help from me, my long-awaited break-through piece just popped right out. Before I knew it, I was making a densely cabled trivet/doily/thingie, using quadrupled strands of thread and changing colors on every round. I found myself trying out extravagantly long stitches, and then hooking those stitches up to other long stitches, a process that resulted in unanticipated, continuous vertical and diagonal lines of color. Those lines accidentally outlined various sections of the piece, producing interesting geometric and organic shapes. Other long stitches, clustering together, covered up whole sections of the concentric “stripes” that ordinarily characterize crochet worked in the round, masking the fact that rounds even existed behind all the frou-frou.
When I was done, I turned the piece over and stared at it in astonishment. From the back, it looked like the wrong side of a piece worked in simple rounds of single crochet stitches. But from the front, the lines of color wandered all over the place in vivid, symmetrical, repetitive patterns. It looked like a stained glass rose window.
Yes, mama! This was what I’d been after! From then on, it was just a matter of playing with the possibilities.
What kinds of yarns, threads, fabrics, hooks, etc. do you like to use?
I typically choose smooth, often slightly stiff, single-color yarns and threads, since these give the lines of color and the shapes they outline the best definition. That said, some of my students have achieved lovely effects with chenille and variegated yarns. Highly textured yarns and designer yarns such as eyelash, however, really don’t show to advantage in Overlay, and they obscure the technique’s most distinctive characteristics. That said, I love it when people break my rules and nibble away the technique’s boundaries by trying other materials.
When using sewing thread for making jewelry, my preference is silk, as long as I can get the colors I want. Silk has a special luster that really sings to me. But I’ll use polyester if that’s the only thing that will give me the effect I’m looking for.
As to hooks, I use a #14 or #15 steel hook when working with sewing thread. Otherwise, I use whatever hook size will give me a nice, tight tension with the yarn I’ve chosen.
How does your crafting fit in with the rest of your life?
It’s really been more a matter of making the rest of my life fit around my crafting. I used to try to wedge blocks of crochet time into a life that acknowledged other priorities. Eventually I realized that I was relegating the things that truly sustained my spirit to not-very-favorite stepchild status. Now I wedge things like housework and grocery shopping in around the edges of my crocheting and other creative activities. If something isn’t going to get done, it’s not going to be my jewelry.
Of course, what that means is that I often find myself living in unmitigated squalor. And I end up eating dry cereal for dinner a lot, since I’ve procrastinated too long about shopping. But, for me, it’s a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.
The other tradeoff, of course, has been an economic one—sometimes that dry cereal thing has more to do with having to wait until I sell a design or a piece of jewelry to buy groceries. Fortunately, I like dry cereal. And I’ve never been particularly acquisitive, which has given me a real advantage when it comes to making a living as an artist, since it means that I’m fine with that living not being a very good one by most people’s standards. I’ve schooled myself to recognize the distinction between what I actually need and what I merely want. It turns out that most of the things our culture defines as “necessities” are actually luxuries. Coming to understand that has been very liberating.
I won’t say there’s not a certain amount of stress involved when, in a month when jewelry sales are down, or class registrations are low, or no royalty checks are expected, I’m not quite sure whether the electric bill will get paid on time. But negotiating my way through that kind of stress is preferable to the alternative, which is to take some boring day job and then sit back to watch my spirit shrivel up and die. For me, it’s a no-brainer.
In addition to jewelry, what other kinds of items do you like to make?
I spend a lot of my time doing other kinds of jewelry, intricate wire-work, mostly—hand-wrought filigrees and delicately beveled stones and cabochons that work as pendants, earrings or centerpieces for bracelets. And I’ve done a lot of crocheted sweaters, but I chafe at having to work to gauge and figure out sizing, etc. Having to plan ahead isn’t my idea of a good time. My sister calls it me being three: like a three year old, I’m not thinking about tomorrow. I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it…which is always right now.
Tell me about your design process.
I used to try to direct the process a lot more than I do now. The left brain thing again. But the right brain muses were very determined in my case, and they finally prevailed. After a period of thinking I knew more about my own creativity than they did (silly me!), I finally accepted that my approach to designing wasn’t going to be up to me. Whether I like it or not—and I have finally come to—my process begins with some vague idea of color or structure. Then I just let things go where they want to go. I’ve come to believe very strongly in following my accidents and mistakes to see where they lead me, trusting that they are actually messages from one or another of those wise little muse critters. And it turns out that it’s also where the best ideas come from, from these unearned, unanticipated, miraculous inspiration-gifts. I’ve sort of come to feel that rejecting these gifts is a form of creative sacrilege. Gifts from the universe should be accepted, appreciated, trusted and honored.
But chasing down such offerings is not possible if I have too rigid an idea of where I think I “should” be going. So I prefer to make things that can just turn out to be whatever size and shape they turn out to be. Like afghan squares and trivets. And jewelry. I just stop when it’s the right size. That’s one of the nice things about the Overlay technique—you can stop after almost any round and it looks done.
Talk about your publishing experiences with regard to your Overlay designs.
It’s been a somewhat rocky road, since my approach to designing is not efficient in the commercial sense. Most of the designers I’ve talked with make their submissions via the “swatch and sketch” method, which gives them a pretty fair certainty of a sale before they invest much time in a design. The down side of this for me is that it requires having a vision of the finished project in your head, or even graphed out on paper. Sometimes an editor will even specify what colors she wants. But since I never know where a piece is going until I get there, and since some specific combination of colors is usually what motivates me to start a new piece in the first place, I have to make the whole thing before submitting it. Otherwise, if I try to make something to order, I can absolutely count on the fact that it will suck.
It’s a very risky approach, though, financially speaking, since it means I have a lot of time invested with no assurance whatsoever that the thing will ever sell. This has been further complicated by the fact that, when the piece is something complex, like Overlay Crochet, very few editors are willing to take it on anyway. Such projects take up too much space in a publication, and editing them can be a huge chore.
So I’ve ended up “wasting” a lot of work over the years, by bottom-line standards. Except that I know I haven’t wasted a single thing, since the bottom line isn’t the standard I measure by. I use the fulfillment standard; the “enjoyment of the process” standard; the standard that acknowledges that the piece that I’m so enjoying working on today would not have been possible had I not experimented on some piece ten or fifteen years ago that never sold. Which leads me to believe that the piece I’m making now, whether it ever sells or not, may be the stepping stone that leads to some other satisfying and lucrative—or not so lucrative—innovation in the future. Or to a teaching gig—that’s happened to me as well, where the piece didn’t sell, but it sold me as a teacher.
If I hadn’t been willing to “waste” a lot of time trying out things that might not work or sell—if I’d tried to smush my creative process into a more commercially viable mode—Overlay Crochet never would have come into being, at least not by my hand. Instead, it’s been a long, enjoyable, fulfilling process that led right here to this moment when I get to feel immensely flattered that you think I’m worth interviewing.
How did you get started publishing your Overlay designs?
Dumb luck, mostly. Early on, I did a blind submission of that breakthrough piece I was talking about earlier to Crochet Fantasy (in that publication’s first incarnation). In doing so, I stumbled on a wonderful, adventurous editor named Karen Manthey, who refused to be daunted either by the amount of work it would take or the number of pages it would eat up. She later accepted even more complicated pieces from me. She has told me since that her approach was to commit to doing it by just officially accepting the piece. That way, by the time she had to face the tedious editing chore, she had no choice. Thanks to her (and more thanks and more thanks), my work in this technique got published and led to wonderful experiences and relationships with other crocheters.
I got lucky again when I was orphaned at the first conference I attended when my roommate had to leave early. Kathleen Power Johnson generously took me in, sight-unseen, for the last two nights, and later proceeded to introduce me to the people at Kooler Design Studio, who ultimately (along with Leisure Arts) had the guts and dedication to risk doing a whole book on a labor-intensive and virtually untried technique.
Talk about your teaching activities, some of the cool things that have happened when you teach the technique. Have others begun to use it in their work?
I got incredibly lucky again with the teaching thing—my first big opportunity came to me. Despite my two decades or so of publishing, I had only taught small groups and individuals at the point that I was invited to submit a proposal for CGOA’s first “Traveling Instructor” position. I spent days on that proposal, and I bid really low in the hope that the Guild’s budget would force them to choose me over the more experienced and (I hoped) more expensive applicants. To be honest, I’d have done it for expense money alone. I’d been a bit tied down taking care of my mother, and hadn’t had so much as a weekend vacation in over a decade, much less the opportunity to travel to places like Alaska and New York. The day I got the good news was a real turning point in my life. I was doing happy dances in my underwear all around the living room.
But, for all my excitement and anticipation, and for all the fringe benefits of income and travel, the actual classroom experiences have been by far the best part. Responses to Overlay Crochet have been beyond my most far-fetched fantasies, and what I have learned from my students has catapulted the technique forward much, much faster than I ever could have done on my own. I was already aware that the approach was in need of new blood—I was starting to see the same visual themes over and over in my own work. But I had no idea how much my students’ ideas and suggestions would enlarge, not only the technique, but my technique, both as an artist and as a teacher.
Some of my students have really pushed Overlay in new directions. Pat Weller, for example, has pioneered both 3-dimensional and felted Overlay Crochet with a spectacular bowl that utilizes her own highly innovative triple-layered “walls.” And Bonnie Pierce, right there in the first Overlay class she ever attended, took the technique into new realms, adding fat bouillons that created textural mountains and valleys. We promptly dubbed her approach “Radical Overlay Crochet.” In her second Overlay class, she figured out how to make an Overlay pendant that was reversible. I’d been sure that that was impossible, yet there she was doing it while still learning the basics of the technique. Amazing!
The amount of talent, skill and persistence present in the average obsessed crocheter never ceases to astound me. I had one student get 45 degrees off track on the fourth round and not realize it until the eighth. Rather than rip out all that work, she simply started designing her own rounds, taking minimal cues from the class project pattern. She ended up with a beautiful, completely unique Overlay piece. Another student caught on so quickly and was such a fast stitcher that she finished her project a good two hours before the class was scheduled to end. So she just kept going, adding wonderful, flowery motifs all around the outer edges. Her finished piece was huge…and gorgeous!
What else can you tell us that you think could be interesting?
One of the most important things I’ve learned from crocheting and everything surrounding it is to resist expecting any particular results from my efforts, not only during the design process, but during the marketing process as well. I’ve learned to just try everything, submit every design, schmooze with every crocheter I meet, take every opportunity (however unpromising it might seem), and then just let go of the results and move on to the next thing. Because most of my most significant financial returns have come long after the instigating effort on my part has passed, and from some entirely unanticipated direction. For example, I was contacted recently by an organization in Ghana about coming there to teach the people of two rural villages Western beading techniques. Apparently the director saw a pair of earrings I’d had published in a recent beading magazine. Never in a million years would I have expected such a result from the little bit of effort I put into that submission well over a year ago!
I’ve also learned that, for me, life is about being eternally three—about being free to create exactly what I feel like creating exactly when I feel like creating it. That’s when I do my best work, and it’s where I take my greatest pleasure. It’s the big payoff. Money comes in a distant second. This has been worth changing the whole structure of my life for; worth living very simply for; worth experiencing an ongoing degree of financial insecurity for, one that nearly all of my friends (the exception being another artist) would find completely intolerable.
There’s another crochet-related subject I find fascinating, one that very often pops up in the later, more relaxed hours of my workshops. It has to do with certain less tangible aspects of crochet, which some students perceive as its therapeutic value and others as something more spiritual than that. I’d been aware of this attribute of the craft for me, but until I started teaching and meeting other people who love crocheting as much as I do, I’d had no idea that it’s such a common experience. But it seems to be. And it goes beyond mere stress reduction.
Here it is. Crocheting apparently, for many of us, generates a healing sense of peacefulness akin to that produced by meditation. My theory is that, like meditation, crocheting requires a narrowed and disciplined focus that results in a quieting of the mind. Therefore, when it is engaged in regularly, it eventually produces many of the same results as daily meditation: reduced stress, an enhanced sense of well-being and self-esteem, an easier acceptance of life’s vicissitudes, and an attitude of greater compassion for one’s fellow beings.
I know I’m going way out on a limb here, but think about it this way: it would explain why, at least in my experience, crocheters, as a group, are among the world’s kindest and most generous-spirited people.
Some day I’d like to organize a free, round-table workshop on that topic. No teacher, no students; just an open exchange of ideas and experiences about the spirituality of crochet.