F / W 2015: Sweet Root

The first piece in the F / W Collection is a familiar one: the Sweet Root cardigan. As with the other items in the collection, it will be available for download this Friday, November 13th.

Sweet Root is knit in Imperial Yarn Tracie Too, a beautiful worsted-spun sport weight wool with a light, crisp hand. Additional details on the yarn and pattern can be found on Ravelry.

  

There is a particular spot that I return to in my memory, when I think of the woods: a clearing in the back woods of Saint Edward Park, a place that I first went when I was nine or ten. There is a loamy path, covered in pine needles and rotten leaves; there is a canopy of cedar and maple overhead, and the chattering of birds, and the smell of wet earth; and there is a young man climbing a tree to pick a licorice fern.

There are four or five of us huddled at the base of the tree - me, my brother, and two or three other children - and when the young man returns to the ground, hands covered in dirt, he snaps the root from the stalk of each tightly furled leaf and hands them to us, exclaiming: they taste like licorice. You should eat them.

It's a memory many times replayed since then: the feeling of unknowing excitement, my cold fingers, the mud on my boots. The taste of the fern root, woody and green; the faint taste of spice and dirt. And from that moment, the unfolding of a corner of some unknown mystery; the internal knitting-together of some thread which connected my small being to the tall green world around me.

So whenever I see those little ferns growing on the slope of some mossy tree, I always think of that place in the woods and the memory they conjure: the licorice ferns; the sweet root.

Happy Monday, friends.

<3

Cory

Model & Styling: Nicole Hood

Designer, Photographer & Styling: Cory Ellen Boberg