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About Christal Seyfarth I live and work on Fanø, a small sandy island off the Danish West Coast in the North Sea. This is where I was born, and my family has been here for centuries, actually since 1541. Most of my family members were sailors, ship owners and captains that started out sailing the waters close to home, and then ventured out to cruise the Seven Seas. Our home was full of souvenirs brought back by my father, grandfather and uncles, and as a child I was mesmerized by the beauty of these momentos: fragile china from the Orient, leathergoods made from the hides of camels, and beautiful conch from the Pacific Ocean. This is where my imagination was born, but it took wings, when - at five years old - I was taught to knit by my grandmother, and looking back I realize that this was the channel that opened my creative mind. Rather quickly I created my own designs full of colour and patterns. At eight years old I was knitting with 15-20 colours, and soon I received orders for knitted sweaters. After several years abroad, both in the US and in Canada, I moved back to Fanø, and my life is - again - affected by the ocean, the tides and the changing weather. Today I work full time with my knitting and I knit both by hand and by machine. Some designs are copied time after time, but most - especially the hand knit ones - are unique and one of a kind. I still love colours and patterns, and I have developed a technique with changing shades that visually makes the patterns float in the background. I love knitting beach roses, this dainty little rose that grows in the beach meadows and dunes at summer time. Often I mix these flowers with motifs of birds and leave them floating on a background of delicate shades of blue and green. The hand knitted models are very time consuming, and none of them are designed ahead of time. The knitting takes on a life of its own between my hands while I knit, and I never know the end result when I start out. I work approximately 150 hours to finish a hand knitted jacket or shawl. Knitting a design by machine does not involve as many knitting hours, but it still requires quite a lot of work done by hand. The colour scheme on the machine knitted designs are more subdued; here I work more in minute details, such as ribbons, mixing patterns and shades. Several of the machine knit models are shaped, which of course is very time consuming as well. All models are completed by hand and the finishing takes almost as much time as knitting the item. |
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