From the Editor: Harvest Hues

Every issue starts with a question. This one started with a color.

I went to the designers with a direction rather than a brief. Warm, deep, autumn without the usual cliches. Rust, cranberry, burnt orange. What came back were three completely different answers to the same question, and those three answers are the issue.

Savita Khurana took the direction at its word. Vibrant Leaves is a leaf lace wrap in solid Blood Orange, a rectangle that tapers to a point at each end, with the edge worked as part of the fabric rather than added at the finish. One color, no colorwork, and it still moves.

Olha Bykova went the other way entirely. The Cranberry Harvest Set is a cowl and a twisted headband in a single tonal cranberry, with texture worked across the whole surface instead of a second shade doing the work. Two patterns in one download, because a cowl wants a headband.

Lori Wagner broke the palette on purpose. The Cambrie Cowl pairs a steady blue-gray against a gradient that moves from rust through brick to warm olive, trading which one carries the bubbles partway up. The blue-gray has no business reading as warm, and it is the best decision anyone made this month. It is what keeps the palette reading as warm instead of going entirely brown.

What all three have in common is not color. It is texture. Leaf lace, dense crochet, and bubbles are three unrelated ways of making a flat piece of fabric do something, and texture is exactly what stops a solid warm shade from going flat. That was not the plan. It is what the plan produced.

There is more in here than the three designs. Three mosaic entries in Stitchopedia, three book reviews with a copy of each book to give away, three conversations with the authors who wrote them, an argument about why crochet charts are easier than you think, and a horoscope that knows exactly how many projects you have on the go.

One more thing before I let you go. I have been thinking about Dolly Parton, and specifically about the coat of many colors. A box of rags, a mother sewing, a story told over the stitching, and a kid who walked into school feeling rich in something everyone else saw as scraps. Her mother was right about what that coat was worth, and Dolly spent a lifetime saying so out loud. It felt worth saying in an issue about color.