Featured Artist - Kate Green Hammond
Kate encountered the idea of making wearable art in New Mexico. Kate says, "You can walk up to strangers wearing beautiful things and ask if they made them - and often they did make them and will tell you all about it." She remembers seeing a gorgeous woven cocoon style top in a shop in Santa Fe when she first moved to Albuquerque in the 1980s, couldn’t afford it, and consoled herself that she wouldn’t have any occasion to wear it anyway. Then the next week she saw a woman wearing the same top while standing in line at the post office. She realized you can wear stunning art anywhere, anytime. From that moment she wanted to make art with yarn.
Kate considers herself an amateur fiber artist knitter, but her work speaks differently. She doesn't sell things and gives a lot of her work away. Everything she makes she considers an opportunity to try out a new technique or learn something new. She knits patterns sometimes, but designs most of what she makes using patterns as more of a text book for construction techniques, garment shapes and finding unusual stitches.
She explains, "Knitters talk about whether they are process or product knitters, whether they prefer the act of making or making to have a finished piece." Kate considers herself a process knitter because she enjoys figuring out how to do things. Her friends call her a knitting engineer. She likes to understand the structure of knit fabrics and teaches advanced techniques to experienced knitters.
Over the years she has presented many programs for the Dropped Stitch Knitters Guild, including crochet tips for knitters, seven ways to knit a tube, swing knitting, one and two color brioche knitting, combination knitting, and how to use variegated yarns.
Kate considers herself a beginner at spinning, but she is making yarn with long color runs in the singles and variable color combinations that is different from anything you can buy. Kate is also beginning to weave as a different way to create texture and move color around. She says she needs color like she needs sunlight and air and often takes inspiration from the way light and color layer in our New Mexico landscapes.
Kate knows a lot of creative people who work in other media and believes that creativity can rise out of the intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas, and that mixing of ideas can happen in play or daydreaming or thinking deeply about something. She says, "Any activity that makes you pay attention to the world around you in a new way can spark creativity."
