A woman in the US, whom I only know through Facebook, keeps butterflies in her back yard and regularly shares stunning photos of the various types of colourful wings. I always stop and admire these pictures when they appear and one morning I woke up obsessed with the idea of translating the butterfly wings into knitting patterns.
Flutterby, based on the Monarch's wings, was the first garment born out of this „butterfly effect“ across continents, reflecting how ideas can take flight in one mind and end up in another, far away, and take on a completely different form.
All the butterfly sweaters are knit from hand dyed yarn from local indie dyers here in Iceland, giving the garments a very fitting organic appearance with its different speckles and hues, as is the nature of hand-dyed yarn. Nature really is the best patterner.
My butterfly collection today also includes patterns based on the Satyr, the Swallowtail, the Blue tiger, the Gulf fritillary and also a tiny little local Moth found in a house in the Icelandic Westfjords. Needless to say, very few of its other majestic and colourful relatives are ever found this far north.
The Autistic factor
Pattern thinking is often referred to as an autistic trait, as many of us notice patterns and repetitions in everything around us. While this isn't true for all autistics, it certainly is for me.
The beauty in my knitted butterfly collection as it was born and is presented, is that there are actually three autistic women involved in its creation. My facebook friend with the butterfly garden is autistic. She was in fact one of the many autism advocates I learned from when first discovering my own diagnosis. I would probably never have started looking at butterflies in the first place if it hadn't been for her educational efforts as an autistic.
The talented photographer who works with me on publishing and presenting my designs also happens to be autistic. We first met shortly before her formal diagnosis, although I recognized our common neurological traits right from the start. One of the clues was the way we clicked right from the start and communicated effortlessly without any small talk. Our photographic sessions usually are the same, short in duration but very effective.
