Casa Bookish has seen some pretty big changes over the last few weeks. It is a really exciting/scary time for me and I want to share a few glimpses of what is going on. Team Bookish has expanded slightly. I've admitted that doing admin isn't my idea of a great time (and that I spend too much time on it), so going forward some of you will start encountering Katherine rather than myself. She has vast experience organising creative brains and she's already made my working life a lot easier behind the scenes. I hope you'll welcome Katherine to the Bookish fold  - she enables me to focus more on designing and she loves a good spreadsheet!

You may have heard me mention this on social media: I'm working on a rather big project. I'm currently doing research and getting the details right, so I can start talking about it properly. It is a book-sized project and it's a somewhat ambitious & left-field one (this is from a woman who did a collection inspired by Mesolithic archaeology, land art, and psychogeography!).

I've shared a few images on Instagram recently that I think you might find interesting.

I keep journals - commonplace books and creative journals, more specifically. I've kept them since I was 14 years old and they are some of my most prized possessions. They are probably not interesting to most people (I jotted down a lot of 'profound' lyrics when I was 14) but I love looking through them.

The images I think you might like are from the creative journal I kept when I was working on the Doggerland collection (the Mesolithic archaeology one).

A photo posted by Karie Westermann (@kariebookish) on Apr 2, 2016 at 8:00am PDT

I find it so fascinating to see how I was working towards a very specific design vocabulary - dots, lines .. more complex motifs - and working on the basic conceptualisation of the projects - .. tools out of what's available .. not making heirlooms but making practical items for here and now. I remember looking at Late Mesolithic pottery and thinking about how the decoration was achieved by pressing reeds into fresh clay - how would I translate that into knitting?

Right now I'm working with a new creative journal filled with similar musings on a completely different topic and a very different concept. Yet again I'm thinking about design vocabulary, colour palettes, and doing the necessary groundwork.

I really, really hope you'll like it.