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Friends of mine are hardcore believers in seasonal magic. As soon as the air starts to turn a hair crisp, the moment we seem to be headed towards autumn, the second garden harvests begin to multiply, they swear they have started to experience the stirrings of seasonal magic. I'll be honest; I never really ascribed one season to magic because each season holds its own special forms of magic, but for my friends, there's really only the one. With the start of meteorological fall tomorrow, my friends will totally start to attribute anything anomalous, anything karmic, anything recognizably lucky or uncanny as the result of "seasonal magic."
They aren't alone. A brief scroll through Instagram reveals a parade of brilliant-colored, autumnally-appropriate material. And, if you're a yarnie, then fiber in an array of golds, reds, purples, oranges, greens, browns, and blacks will fill your feed. Camera wizardry showcasing stunning projects and yarns lit softly and often surrounded by fall-ish props including mugs of hot cider, gooey caramels, mouth-watering confections, and various bits of flora and fauna dominates your screen, calling you to add to the stash and get those itchy fingers crafting.
And let's not forget the burst of pattern releases that typically accompanies fall. From eye-popping colorwork patterns to tempting textures, designers seem to have received an early dose of seasonal magic the closer and closer we inch to the Ber-months.
I admit it; I'm a sucker for all of it. The smells, the crunchy leaves, pumpkins, the baking, the harvesting, the crafting... all of it. And, once the seasonal magic fairies take control of social media, particularly Instagram, I so want to make all the things, never mind the fact that doing so would mean foregoing sleep until sometime next summer and that my fingers might fall off in the meantime.
The pull of seasonal magic when you're a stitcher is hard to resist. And, let's be honest, I am most certainly not about to dissuade you because fall is a yarn shop's best season, often making up for the nail-bitingly sparse and terrifyingly quiet late spring and summer. Fall is what helps pay the utility bills and buy groceries in our business. But even if the LYS fate wasn't tied to fall, I still wouldn't talk you out of the urge to try all the things because I've never been that friend. Instead, I'll encourage you to surrender to the pull of the season because maybe my friends got it right, that seasonal magic is almost stronger in the fall. If seasonal magic is whispering that you need to try out spinning fiber, then I say, "Go for it." If seasonal magic is encouraging you to pick a particularly bold color for a project when you typically opt for neutrals, maybe you should listen. If seasonal magic is sending you dreams of gloriously complicated cables or felting a swatch so you can use it for wool applique, then by all means, YES!
While autumn is generally the time that our part of the world is preparing for the deep sleep of winter, when the growing time is over and we're putting gardens to bed, I often find a burst of creativity that only seems to rise to the surface during this transitory time. Maybe it's the bounty of fresh produce that we see at farm stands or that moment when we begin to wonder if we'll ever be finished picking cherry tomatoes off the vines. Maybe the restlessness of wild animals as they become more and more active at dawn and dusk, calorie loading now because they know that once winter hits, food will be more scarce influences us and makes us more restless and active after lounging around in the summer heat. Maybe it's the promise of new television shows with fall premieres with new stories that excites us. Whatever the contributing factors, fall carries with it an energy unlike any other time of year, probably because we experience the true height of fall and the peak of leaf viewing for such a short period of time. For that reason, I suggest we embrace that energy and seek to try new things, do new things, maybe finish once-new things. As yarnies, we already engage in the acts of creating things from raw materials. Riding the wave of autumnal seasonal magic might give us an added boost, which I'm sure we could all use.