season 2, episode 12 - swatching the tarot
welcome 2022! as we near the end of season 2, our host ash alberg examines how tarot has inspired their creative practice for the past several years. they talk about the initial spark of inspiration from the very first #creativecovenchallenge; to an IGTV/vimeo series called swatching the tarot where they combine their natural dye colour palette studies, knitting swatches, and study of each of the tarot cards; to the major arcana socks volumes; and where they envision this creative fire going next. you can join ash for a very special live round of the #creativecovenchallenge from february 21-25! sign-ups can be found at ashalberg.com/live-challenge-sign-up. you can also find the challenge and work through it at your own pace 24/7 within the creative coven community.
each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is "orishas, goddesses, and voodoo queens" by lilith dorsey.
take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!
seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council.
transcript
ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place.
Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey.
Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.
Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]
Happy New Year and welcome to 2022. We are almost at the end of season two of Snort and Cackle, and I'm really excited for season three to get started because our lineup of interviews is just delightful. Before we get to that point, of course we have our book review episode coming up after this week's episode to close out the season and so if you haven't already grabbed your copy of Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey, we do still have a bit of time for you to grab a copy and binge it before we do our book club review.
And so this week, as we welcome in the new year, I realize that not everybody takes the time in this particular portion of the year to be reviewing old projects and patterns, sometimes literal, sometimes figurative, and to be making plans for the upcoming year, but I do. And over the last several years, I have determined that it actually works really well for me. I enjoy taking this time of year, which is here in the north very cold frequently and it's dark and it's an ideal time of contemplation and introspection.
And I'm also looking forward to the upcoming year and what it has to offer as we sit now on this side of Yule and on the far end of the solstice. And the days are getting longer. And for somebody who has a really hard time sitting still, I don't do vacations particularly well, unless those vacations are in movement via the means of travel usually.
It's actually useful for me to have a little bit of structure and I enjoy the structure of using the new year as a way of looking at things that I have done in the past year and what I've learned and what I have enjoyed. And also things that I didn't enjoy and reflecting on them and whether they offer anything useful for me moving forward or whether it's time to let something go and move on to something new.
And so I'm excited to talk today about a project that began I think last year. 2020. Yes. And could honestly take me through the rest of my life and into more lifetimes past that, just with the amount of creative possibility that it offers me. And that is my project called Swatching the Tarot. And it began from really humble beginnings and has become multiple large projects in and of themselves.
And I have even more ideas of where it could go. But it's something that I really enjoy and take a lot of creative energy from, and even when it feels like it sits a little bit more dormant at certain points, as I focus on other projects I find myself being excited about returning to it and getting back to some of these big plans that I have for it.
Yeah. So Swatching the Tarot started with my very first Creative Coven challenge. We're going to talk more about the challenge near the end of the episode, because we've actually got a live round coming up pretty soon at the end of February.
So this episode is coming out the first week of January 2022, and if you are listening to it in the next few weeks then we will be having a live round of the Creative Coven challenge coming up the week of February 21st through 24th. And if you don't listen to the episode in time, that's okay because you can find the Creative Coven challenge 24/7 in the Creative Coven community and work through it in your own time as often as you want.
But the first time that I ever ran it, I decided that I was going to participate alongside the other participants. And so I have come to really appreciate the value of a good swatch. And so for those of you who are not knitters or if you are newer to knitting, then a swatch is basically a small, usually square, but can be any shape of knitting that you use, and usually you are testing out different ideas, trying out a certain yarn. And most specifically you are checking your gauge to make sure that if you are working off of a pattern or you are trying to figure out the math for a new pattern, you are on track with it and that it’s not going to be too big or too small depending on what it is that you are trying to make.
And swatching can be something that can feel really tedious. And for many years, for me as a knitter, I absolutely felt like that. I just did not understand why would you spend a few hours knitting a swatch if you're going to end up just knitting the sweater anyway? I've come to learn and as a designer have really come to appreciate the fact that the swatch is something that you should trust.
And 9 times out of 10, its magic is accurate. And so if you don't want to go wasting time and knitting something that turns out to be way too big or way too small then you do your swatch and if you spend three hours knitting a swatch, maybe and then you turn out that you don't like it, whether it's because the stitches aren't behaving the way that you want, or the yarn doesn't work with the pattern, the way you thought it would, or you just don't like the way that the fabric feels against your skin, it's a much shorter commitment to knit a swatch for a few hours, spend half an evening, one movie, two movies, knitting a swatch, than it is to knit an entire sweater and then cast it off your needles only to realize that it does not fit, or to knit two or three skein fingering weight shawl only to realize that the yarn, as you're knitting it, is really making the stitches look really messy and now you have to frog back many hours of work.
So I really appreciate a good swatch for that. I also really love it as a creative process. I, again, I have a really hard time sitting still, and that is largely because my brain has a hard time sitting still. And so I find myself frequently dealing with the issue of cast-on-itis, which is where you just want to cast on all the things other than whatever it is that you're currently knitting. And that can be just generally distracting and as a designer who has deadlines can be actually really problematic depending on what it is I'm doing.
And especially when I'm working on like larger projects or I am thinking of longer term new books or big ideas, then it works really well for me to knit up a swatch or 2 or 12, and to see if they're going to do what I want them to. And basically to get that creative energy out into the world on something tangible in a piece of knitted fabric, and then to get my ass back to whatever it is I'm actually supposed to be working on in the moment.
And I label my swatch with whatever yarn I used and the needles that I used. And if I used a stitch from a stitch dictionary, which stitch dictionary and on what page and if I made any modifications or if I wrote up a chart and stored it in my computer, then you know, what is the name of the chart?
I make a note of all those things, and then I can put that somewhere away so that then when I have time to turn to it, I can go and deal with it then. And if that takes three months or if it takes three years, I don't have to worry about it because I've already taken those first initial steps. And I find also, swatching can be really beneficial when you are feeling stuck in a project or feeling stuck in like a creative rut and you just don't really know what it is you want to do but you just need to get back into the motion of making things.
It's like for writers, how they will just have morning pages where you just free write. And it doesn't need to be for anything. It doesn't need to have an end purpose. Nobody else ever needs to see it. It's just for your own creative, artistic practice, to be in practice.
And I find swatches just so useful for that. And so I, as a teacher, wanted to encourage my design students to have like a fun, creative, short-term, high impact activity that they could turn to as often as they need. And the Creative Coven challenge was born from that.
And so it certainly doesn't need to be only for designers. If you are just a knitter who wants to test out a different yarn and a pattern that you're excited about then this can work. If you are thinking maybe you want to make a tweak or two, or you want to substitute a different stitch in for something that's suggested in a pattern or you are … you've got this idea in your head and you never want to make a pattern that makes you money off of it, you just want to knit that thing in your head for yourself.
The Creative Coven challenge can be really good for turning that idea out from just being floating around in your brain, into tangible stitches. And the Creative Coven challenge is a swatching challenge. And so over a series of very simple exercises, you basically go from having a source of inspiration through to having a knitted swatch by the end of the challenge.
And so, the very first time that I did the Creative Coven challenge and that I hosted it on Instagram, I decided to participate alongside the participants. And I ended up completely and surprisingly inspired by the Major Arcana. And I started off with a different type of inspiration, a different source, and then I was playing with my deck and The Lovers came up and it just clicked.
And that ended up resulting in a much larger project because that initial idea just felt so concrete. And then I thought, okay, what if I made a pattern for every single card in a tarot deck? And there are 78 cards in a tarot deck, a traditional one at least. And I did the math and I thought to myself, okay, even if I, let's say that I restricted only to sock patterns, which I can turn out a pair of socks in … specifically knitting the samples. If I do nothing else or very little else, I can turn out a pair of socks every two weeks.
That does not include writing those patterns and getting them tech edited and going through all of those processes. And I did the math and I thought about, okay, what's my average output of patterns in a normal year? And at that time I was quite prolific, not necessarily in a good way, with my pattern releases within any given year. And I figured it would be about a six-year committed project to work my way through every single card in the tarot.
And I thought to myself, that's a really ridiculous concept and a really long-term commitment that honestly, my Aries brain is not going to be so happy about. And then I thought, okay, what happens if I just shrink it down to the Major Arcana? Which is still 22 cards, and that is still a large number of patterns to be committing to.
And so then I thought, okay, what if I just make some swatches? And what if I combine those swatches and the study of each of those individual cards, which are then going to inspire the stitches that I choose? What if I combine that with my natural dye color palette study? I, as a natural dyer, am deeply devoted to my local color palette and just local color palettes across the board.
I love studying what a specific area’s color palette is and how it relates to the flora that are there and how it relates to the traditions and the culture and the fashion and the ecology. And I just think it's totally fascinating. And as a northern dyer, it's also been a deep passion of mine because there are significantly fewer resources for the growing zones that I live in, at least in terms of easily accessible ones that are all cohesive and contain all the information that you need.
So my own personal practice involves a lot of study of my local color palette and then I translate that to my natural dying students by teaching them how to evaluate the botany of the plants that they use, because I live in an area where it's plants that we work with, and mushroom and dying is a different beast that I leave to the experts in those areas and that I play with casually in my own studies, but for me, it's plants.
And as a hedge witch, that connection also feels really lovely, and seeing the correlation between the magical and medicinal and dye properties and culinary properties of many of these plants is just an ongoing source of fascination for me. And so I had started dying mini skeins, so similar to a swatch where you're not committing a whole massive amount of material to something, but you're just testing something out. And so these mini skeins were perfect because I was slowly like … but not that slowly … creating a really large collection of these mini skeins that also had no purpose at that point in time, other than just my own nerdy questions.
And the colors are just so subtle that it's very hard, honestly, to see just how vast the diversity is of that color palette if you're not seeing it in person. There's only so much that video and photography can capture when it comes to the variation and the subtle discrepancies between the different dyes.
And so I didn't really know what else to do with them as I was like, amassing this collection of them. And then I thought, okay, what if we then study each of the plants more as well and figure out, are there plants that feel like they correlate more with certain tarot cards and how do they feed into one another? Is it the plant that feels relevant, is it the color that feels relevant? Are we just going to happen to use this particular one because it looks better in the kind of rolling out of each of the swatches one by one after another?
And that became Swatching the Tarot, which you can find on fromfieldtoskin.com. It lives there permanently. You can also find it on IGTV under both my @sunflowerknit account as well as @fromfieldtoskin’s account. And it turned into just this like really nerdy first foray into doing some video content.
I deeply loath making video content if I'm being completely honest, unless I'm teaching because the editing for it is just such a pain in the ass. Like the whole reels thing, I will just never be a Tiktoker because to make good video content, which I want to do, then it takes like, I don't know … Shitty Tiktok takes 30 minutes for a 15 second thing. Like I just, I don't have time for that. I have other things to do.
It is not my passion. It is not my zone of genius. Maybe someday I will hire somebody who can do it for me [Laughs] and just follows Willow around. I --that would actually maybe be entertaining. But in the meantime, I will just take really crappy videos and reels and boomerangs of her and pop them into my stories without worrying about the quality of that content. [Laughs.]
But IGTV, I thought to myself, okay. I want to figure out a way of playing with this new medium, which at that time was the thing to be working with. And I thought, okay, is there a way that I can find myself a little bit more interested in this particular marketing tool?
I'm only semi-interested, but I was deeply interested in the actual content of the videos and adding it on to other forms via Vimeo rather than just having it live on Instagram, which feels like it's so frequently has just such a short finite life. That felt worth it.
So yeah, so that was the start of it, and I made my way through the Major Arcana. And that was … if you've got one video per week, you've got almost half a year's worth of content right there, which that felt good. That felt like an interesting project and also felt like kind of the accurate amount of focus that I have. [Laughs.]
There's a reason that each season of Snort and Cackle only has 13 episodes. I need a bit of a break in between. And also to binge through recording things and then get a bit of a break in between to organize them the next year or the next season’s content and organizing interviews and things like that.
So yeah, so Swatching the Tarot started off as this study of the Major Arcana via my local plant color study and also via the joy of swatching. From very humble beginnings of a swatch as a result of the very first Creative Coven challenge. And then, I knew as I was making the swatches for the full Major Arcana, I knew that I wanted them to be socks because that felt … I deeply love socks. They're also just a very satisfying thing to knit and unlike shawls, one can never have too many socks because one does not necessarily want to wash socks so frequently. And so it felt not ridiculous to put out 22 sock patterns.
And so this year, or this past year, cause now it's technically 2022, I released the first volume of the Major Arcana socks patterns. And so for the next two years, I will be committing to completing those sock patterns and they all started with the Swatching the Tarot swatches, and I am slowly making my way through turning each of those swatches into their own sock pattern.
2022, we'll see volume 2. 2023, we'll see volume three come out to complete it. And then I ended up earlier this year taking a Ukrainian pattern work course and … or workshop. Now stay with me because I promise this makes sense and it's not as random as that seems. So I took this Ukrainian pattern work workshop and fell down the rabbit hole of looking into my own Polish heritage and similar patterns that are traditional to that area which I just, I love this about humans. There's this like crazy collective consciousness that exists to a level that like, we can't even untangle it because who the fuck knows where it actually started and how much of it is separate or taken from one place and transplanted in another.
But there are motifs that are the exact same. They translate to the same thing. They mean similar things. They look almost identical in every corner of the globe that have existed for hundreds and thousands of years in some cases. And it's at a stage now where we can't even say this one definitely only belongs to this because the history of that same motif in a different area is also so ancient and old that to track each of them back, we just don't even have the records to prove who started what, where, when.
I think that's really fucking cool. And so I took this Ukrainian pattern work course, and then I fell down the rabbit hole of Polish pattern work and found certain motifs that were drawn as protective runes, most frequently. And they'd be painted on walls of cottages or drawn in the dirt floors and drawn around window frames and doorways to protect the inhabitants and would be sketched in the earth all the way around a bed to protect someone as they slept.
And I think that's really fucking cool and really powerful. And there were a few different motifs that I am now really interested in turning into texture to then study each of the four suits of the tarot. And again, we're dealing with 78 cards total. We've dealt with 22 of them through the Major Arcana. The other 56 … is that math right? Yes. They will need to be worked through on their own timeframe. And I'm going to use, I think, these traditional runes and shapes to play with those.
And that will take me them through the rest of the Arcana via the Minor Arcana suits. And I have already also assigned certain natural dyes that I will use to then make those swatches and they're going to get split according to what the type of dye is. And I'm just, I'm really excited about it. And I'm also very aware that I probably won't have time for it for at least probably two years.
And in the meantime, I will continue growing my dye plants and foraging more dyes and prepping my mini skeins for the time that I do have to get around to knitting those next batches of swatches. And at some point, I would love to see an Oracle deck or tarot deck turn into or come out of these studies, and certainly I envision a book coming out of it, who the fuck knows?
There's so much potential for it. But I just, I think it's so neat that a single moment and a single swatch could inspire so many different ideas. And part of why I am not scared of telling any of you this is a. because I do my best and not always successfully, but I try my best these days at least, to not operate from scarcity mode and being precious about creative ideas feels like a really unhelpful and very toxic concept. And also there's so much potential from the tarot. Just look at the number of tarot decks that are out there.
So for me to say, I am inspired by the tarot in my knitting, even if you were to go back and look at each of the swatches I've already knit and the patterns that I've already released, and then tried to use that as a starting point, we would all end up with completely different results.
Maybe some of them would look similar-ish, but they would all be unique. And that is because we all start … we might start with the same initial source of inspiration, but then it gets filtered through our personal lenses, which have so many other things factoring into what we then ultimately put out into the world that it's extremely rare.
Like you really have, you honestly really have to fucking try to copy somebody and it feels to me like an incredibly boring pursuit that also requires a lot of energy and also means that you're always one step behind. So it's a futile pursuit, at least as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. I'm telling you this because I've gotten so much creative joy out of this and plan on continuing this creative joy, because I have so many ideas for where it can go next.
And if you want to use the tarot as a starting point for your own creative ideas, be my guest. And also if you want to join us for the next live round of the Creative Coven challenge, you are also more than welcome. Please do join us.
So basically, like I said earlier, the Creative Coven challenge is a swatching challenge that takes you through a series of simple steps that take you from initial source of inspiration to an end result of some tangible knitting in your hands via a swatch. And then from there, you take it to wherever you want it to go.
And so you can find it 24/7 and work on it at your own pace, as often as you want within the Creative Coven community all the time. And we are going to do a live Creative Coven challenge also within the community from the week of February 21st through 25th. The live component is going to be that we have some live zoom calls that participants are going to be able to join in for, so there'll be three zoom calls over the course of that week.
We'll get started together. If anyone has any questions, if anyone needs a starting point, then we're gonna work through those things. And then we'll meet midway through, see where folks are at, see who's stuck on what, see if things are going the way you're anticipating, or if a hiccup has come or if a completely new trajectory has come.
And then we're also going to come together at the end and celebrate, and if people have ideas or aren't quite sure of where they can take their new swatch next, then I will be there live to talk you through idea. We can be brainstorming together. If you have questions of how to take this swatch and turn it into something else, we can talk through some of the simple ways of doing that.
And then of course, if you want to take it further then the Creative Coven design course is designed to take you to that next step of doing all of the math and turning an idea into a finished pattern that you can then publish and be selling. And then do that over and over again.
Or do it once, if you only want to do it once, or do it three times if you only want to do it three times, but it'll take you through all of those steps. But with the challenge then there's not that pressure. You don't have to be wanting to commit to a lifetime of designing or a career of designing or the serious side hustle of designing.
It's just for creative play and joy and just an exercise in flexing our creative muscles and our knitting muscles at the same [time.] And you have to be a member of the Creative Coven community to participate and you can sign up at any time at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community.
And specifically, if you want to join us for the Creative Coven challenge in the community, you are dealing with a monthly subscription. It's a membership site. And if you join us now, then you'll have time to check out all the other content. It also means that you'll be charged a monthly fee before we get around to doing the Creative Coven challenge.
But I hope that you want to hang out with us in there. There's lots of other content. That's really great. We have Zoom knit nights the first Tuesday of every month. And there's a bunch of other fun things that are being added to the community this year that I'm really excited about. And so you can check out specifically more details about the challenge at ashalberg.com/live-challenge-sign-up.
So that's ashalberg.com/live-challenge. Links will be in the show notes and also in the transcript, of course. But yeah, I really hope to see you there and I'm excited to see what people create as a result of it. And I'm going to also participate again because I really enjoy, I really enjoy it. It's a fun little exercise for me.
And I also plan on sharing some of the swatches that I have been making for my next book project, which I'm going to be working on quite intensively this year. Our plan at this point is to be photographing it near the end of the year, and then hopefully publishing in time for spring 2023.
These book babies are long-term commitments, hence why I refer to them as babies. They have very long incubation periods or gestation periods, both. But yeah, it's … at this point, I do have all of the patterns in motion. And so I will share the swatches so that you can see where I'm getting started with that and then also what our color palette is.
And then you can see where things go from there and in a little over a year you'll even be able to see what did those swatches turn into? But, yeah. So I hope that you have had a good start to 2022, and that you have released what you needed to release from 2021 or are in the process of it, or have maybe just decided that you're going to take a nice, big exhale and getting ready for your next inhale.
Welcome to the new year and thank you for listening. And I will be back with you next week for our final episode of Snort and Cackle season two. And have a great week!
[Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.
Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.