Pokolenia

When I dyed my first skein, I thought it was a private matter between me and the color. 
That it all began and ended in the studio.

Working on this book, I realized how wrong I was.

I asked the designers where their patterns had come from. Not one of those stories began with yarn.

Aleksandra went back to a fairy tale she had read as a child. Anna found embroidery charts left behind in the attic of a house at the foot of the Karkonosze Mountains. Iwona turned to Kashubian embroidery, paying her respects to a craft that was here long before us. Other designs grew out of Łowicz stripes, Kurpie stars, Kuyavian ornament, the wooden architecture of Podhale.

Every one of them had a life of its own before it ever reached the needles or the hook.

That is what Pokolenia— Generations — is about. About what we are given by the people who came before us, and about what we can pass on. About tradition that doesn't have to stay the same in order to survive. It can change its shape, its colors, its techniques, the way we read it - and still be itself.

What I'm putting into your hands is a collective work, made shoulder to shoulder with friends and with designers I admire. Each of them reached into Polish heritage and told a piece of it again - in her own voice, with needles and hook.

I hope that when you cast on your first stitches, you'll feel what I did:

that you're not doing this on your own.

Someone held this pattern in their hands before you.

Someone will hold it after you.

Marcin

A beautifully printed book curated by Martin's Lab.

"Pokolenia" contains 13 designs from mittens, shawls to sweaters. All designs are created with Martin's Lab yarn available in the shop.

The talented designers participating in the collection are: Karolina Bodecka · Agnieszka Dzikiewicz-Krawczyk · Iwona Eriksson · Renata Grabska · Hanna Maciejewska · Aleksandra Macul · Dorota Morawiak-Lichota · Anna Pusiarska · Elżbieta Torenc.

Specifications

• Format: paperback, matte cover
• Patterns: 13
• Pages: 136
• Language: Polish
• Photography: Jakub Grabowski
• Location: Olender Ethnographic Park, Wielka Nieszawka, Poland
• On the cover: Koliba Cowl by Agnieszka Dzikiewicz-Krawczyk
• ISBN: 978-83-982985-0-6
• Publisher: Martin's Lab Sp. z o.o.