I first started out my life in art and color as a painter and I was painting white still lives, that was my big thing.
And when I came to England, I set up a studio and I discovered they had beautiful yarns, these incredible knitting yarns.
And so I bought up 20 colors and knitted an incredible sweater that led me to a career in designing knitwear
because it was more unusual than anything anybody had seen because I put 20 colors in the first sweater.
So I've just developed this career in textiles which I love more than painted.
It was just a fantastic way of dealing with color in a different way from working on an easel and from a still life.
You made something that people could wear out into the world so that what you created was mixing with the tapestry of color on the world.
And then from there I went on to doing needle point and did books on all these things and then on to patchwork quilts, which is my big market right now,
is designing textiles and making these patchwork quilts and doing books on them.
Primarily our world is about putting together color arrangements and then we put those into books to inspire people to have a good themselves.
For us, the highest compliment we can have is somebody will come up towards and say look what I've made inspired by your work.
They're taking our structure but done the wrong colorway.
And that's that towards you know, very life enhancing because it's one thing working with your hands but color is psychological.
And a lot of people get intimidated by when they look at our work because we do use a lot of color and pattern but when you break it down into units it's very simple structures.
And once you learn the basic techniques you can fly.
When I'm designing these days I'm designing from a collection that I have designed and is on the market at that particular season.
So we try to limit it to 20 so that you can give the instructions for people to carry it out in the books.
It is a very rich and exciting way of playing with color because you're bringing you know flower prints and geometric prints and great stripes that are woven in India and stuff like all of these wonderful worlds together in one textile.
Color is my silly passion and that's what I concentrate on.
I'm not terribly interested in different textures and different types of yarn and so forth as long as the color is rich and exciting.
Basically I like a good just amount of colors that I can play with and create a tapestry of color.
And with the patchwork I'm really just developing my own type of prints which I like big scale florals and big geometrics, huge circles and stripes and things so that they're very playful and they're very pronounced.
There's nothing to show how about them.
The big secret for what we do is that none of our work is done on the computer. All of it is done by hand and we don't pre-plan anything.
It's a completely spontaneous work. You know like you'll make a mess in the studio and out of the corner of that mess you'll see some wonderful little color combination that was totally accidental and that becomes the theme of the next piece.
Basically as Kate says when we're knitting we're painting with yarn but the biggest secret that we can give to anybody is that we pin up our work, stand back, look at it from a distance and then build the color palette as we're going along.
Nothing is preconceived and so it's a very organic kind of process.
Color affects us so emotionally. You know I've had experiences where I've gotten incredibly frustrated in my mind because something's not going right.
You know like everyone has those days where you're just in a turmoil in your head and I've come across a field of flowers or an amazing room that's just painted a wonderful color or a fantastic painting with tapestry hanging in a room.
And I can just feel myself, my spirit rising and my worries sinking away because it just is a powerful force if we open ourselves to it.