As a Morehouse knitter, you’ll know Evi as the designer of the Pagoda Cap and Mittens, and the inspiration for the Sojourn variation.
In the winter of 2003, Evi was a painter and was living in a small vacation house on the Hudson River, using the house as her painting studio when she was not working for Margrit: dyeing wool, designing knitting patterns, teaching classes.
We had one car between us, so each morning I would drive her, past the hoarfrost covered grasses on Turkey Hill Road, to the dyeing studio in the barn at Morehouse Farm.
As she entered the toasty room to begin her work for the day, it was a lovely scene: the windows were sunny and bright, the shorn sheep bleated in the barn below, and the room was festooned with dozens of skeins of pure white wool, awaiting Evi’s artistic inspiration. In addition to dyeing the yarn, her job was to dream up suggestive, irresistible, scrumptious names for each color combination. That was half the fun!
At the end of the day, I would come to the farm to pick her up, and found her tired-but-happy, the studio magically transformed from virginal white to a piñata of color. It is heartwarming to know that all of these beautiful skeins of yarn are now being worn as hats, scarves, socks and sweaters, having been worked by knitters, all over the country.
When Evi developed cancer, she was the Public Art coordinator for Inverness, Scotland (‘the Highlands and Islands’). She believed that art was best experienced in public, so that the largest number of people could enjoy and learn from it. One of the greatest public art events I know of is the annual Sheep and Wool Fair in Rhinebeck: all that creativity, all those artists, all that beautiful wool, all those gorgeous colors!
– Adrienne Westmore