Metamorphosis Collection preview
Metamorphosis 🐛 Six new colors inspired by the work, research, and life of Maria Sibylla Merian
In the 1600s wee Maria was tasked with finding bugs to bring home for her illustrator/printmaker father to use in his botanical prints. At this time the predominant belief about most insects were that they were not only manifestations of satan, but that they did reproduce as we know now. Instead all insects were suggested to be made possible from bizarre recipes you could use to spontaneously generate a scorpion from, say, some rocks and mud.
Maria would go on to study caterpillars and moths in their natural settings and life cycles, obsessively watching pupa and chrysalis all night to watch caterpillars turn into moths and butterflies.
She’d later get married, leave her husband, join a commune and get divorced becoming a single parent, quit the commune, take her daughter to French Guiana where she questioned monocropping and slavery - all the while sketching detailed and gorgeous illustrations of insects in watercolor (women were not to use oil paint at the time per the Dutch masters).
Her work is collected in two volumes and her daughter finished a third after her death. Her careful research was borrowed Linnaeus in building a classification system, her original drawing style pairing her subjects with their natural enviroment was borrowed by Audubon, and she contributed much to what would eventually become the field of ethnobotany and our understanding of the trippy process that is metamorphosis today.
These six layered tonal colors echo bright watercolor hues under carefully printed lines. Developed with the subtle warm undertones of yak fibers, they are also stunning on brighter yarns!
The below colors will be coming with me to Indie Untangled on October 16, on full 100g skeins on four bases - and as mini sets on yak sock and yak/silk DK bases! Extras from the event will be uploaded to the website on November 1.
If you'd like to read more about Maria, I highly recommend Chrysalis by Kim Todd
All colors, from left to right: yak sock (Ursula Base) yak/silk DK (Brontë Base), sock (Solnit Base), worsted (Edgar Base)
