The original story of our designs

There are three of us behind these socks — Aleks, Linda, and Elizabeth — and every design we've ever made began as a moment one of us didn't want to lose. People sometimes ask where the patterns come from, as if there were a catalog somewhere. There isn't. There's just the three of us, and the things we can't stop thinking about.

From our childhood

Some of those moments are old. Aleks grew up with painted flowers on wooden bowls, little blue birds on the teacups, and patterned mittens that came out of the drawer with the first snow. Nobody called it design back then. It was just what the kitchen looked like, what winter looked like, what a grandmother's hands were always busy with.

Those patterns never really left her. They waited, for years and an ocean, and eventually found their way onto a pair of our socks — the fair-isle bands, the folk flowers, the birds.

From the road

Some are from the road. Linda and Elizabeth came home from Alaska with a wolf story they couldn't stop telling — one lone shape on a ridge at dusk, and the whole car gone quiet watching it. And a moose that stood in the middle of the road one morning and would not be hurried, so they waited, and it looked at them the entire time.

They came home and drew both. That's how it usually goes: something stops you, and a few months later it's a sock.

From the garden

The garden is theirs too. Every summer the nasturtiums and the pansies take over, because neither of them can stop planting more. There's always one more packet of seeds, one more corner that could use some color. By July it's a happy mess, and by August it's on our drawing table.

And Linda's colors — bright, unapologetic, a little bit flower child — sneak into everything she touches. If a pair of our socks looks like it might have been at a music festival in 1969, that one's hers.

And the foxes

The foxes just kept turning up in the fall, year after year, until we gave in and put them on a sock. Some designs you plan. Some just insist.

We knit them

We hold on to those moments the only way we know how. We knit them. Then we fuss over the colors until they feel right, and hope that when you pull a pair on, a little of that moment comes with them.

Most of these designs will come back in goat hair, so you haven't seen the last of them. The merino versions won't — this is the last of our Siberia Spirit merino, and it's on sale through Monday, September 14. The whole collection is here.

Warmly,
Aleks, Elizabeth, and Linda