June 2025 - Leila Raven
June's Beanie Brigade features 2 skeins of our Recollect Sport - a yarn that is near and dear to our hearts as the wool is raised and sheared in Montana and Wyoming, spun in Wyoming, and ultimately dyed in Great Falls. This springy 2-ply Rambouillet is made with 75% naturally white fiber and 25% naturally black fiber, creating a grey base with which we dye 30+ dark and moody colors.
The two exclusive colors for this month create the color palette "Beanie Brigade Into the Woods" were inspired by the featured pattern for the month, the Mauna Hat by Leila Raven, which tells a story of the protection of sacred mountains. The colors of "Beanie Brigade Into the Woods" represent the forests on the mountains of Western Montana, sharing a bit of our home state with you.
We are excited to share with you a wonderful discussion with Leila about her inspiration for the Mauna Hat and the wider story behind her designs and creation process.
June Designer - Leila Raven
Q: Can you take a moment to introduce yourself?
My name is Leila Raven and I’m a knitter, designer and recently, art director for NH-based Harrisville Designs and Peace Fleece. I currently reside in the state of Maine, on the unceded homelands of the Wabanaki Confederacy, representing the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples indigenous to this land.
Q: This month's featured Beanie Brigade hat, the Mauna Hat, is from a wider collection of patterns - Mana Wāhine which was inspired by your Hawaiian heritage. Can you take a moment to tell us about the significance of the wider collection as well as the symbolism found in the Mauna hat?
I so appreciate that the Mauna hat was chosen for Beanie Brigade. The Mana Wāhine collection is the most meaningful project I’ve worked on in all my years of knitting by trade. Françoise Danoy and I were mutual fans of each other’s work and in getting to know each other online, discovered many running parallels in our personal journeys, living in diaspora and seeking reconnection to our respective heritages (Native Hawaiian and Māori), and traveling back to our homelands for the first time, which were profound experiences for us both. Frenchie reached out to see if I would be interested in exploring how to incorporate that journey into our design work, and the project flowed together from there into a collection of six pieces, released in three series, with storytelling to accompany the patterns themselves.
The triangle motifs in the Mauna hat symbolize mountains, for which it’s named (mauna means mountain in ‘Ōlelo Hawaii) and people: my family, my ancestors, and the community I spent brief time with during the Mauna Kea protests in 2019, when the construction of a thirty-meter telescope on the summit of our sacred mountain was blockaded and ultimately prevented.
Q: What's your favorite part of the design process: idea creation, swatching, making or finishing?
All of it. I love sketching and visualizing all the various ways an idea can be approached; then swatching gives me a reality check, honing in on perfect pattern-yarn harmony; then furiously making up the prototype to see if everything is really going to work (I sometimes get hyper-focused at this part and end up with multiple sweaters in quick succession, each one with subtle adjustments); and finally, the finished result of drafting the pattern itself, coming at it from the angle of the knitter’s experience of the instructions (which is an entirely separate “make” that is equally fascinating…). So many moving parts and considerations. It makes my restless brain happy.
Q: Previously you’ve spoken about the significance of ravens in your life and the power of choosing your last name. Can you tell our readers about the personal meaning of ravens to you?
So, when I’m not knitting, I’m studying astrology (specifically western, and traditional/Hellenistic). I’m a Gemini rising, and in astro terms, Mercury is the ruler of my ascendant. One of Mercury’s many attributes I identify with is psychopomp, messenger between worlds, and ravens to me symbolize the constant journey I take between my own inner and outer worlds, as well as the communication of ideas and their underlying meaning, which are a driving force in my life. There is (now unfortunately extinct in the wild) a corvid species native to Hawai’i called the ʻalalā, which also carried the status of psychopomp in Hawaiian mythology, leading souls to their final resting place on the cliffs of Ka Lae. The archetype of the raven echoes throughout my life.
On the practical level, my former husband’s surname translates into “raven” and after we divorced, I decided not to return to my maiden name. It was an almost audible click when I chose the name Raven. One of the most empowering things a person can do is tell the world what you shall be called by (shout-out to authors Ursula K. LeGuin and Michael Ende for teaching me this early on).
Q: In our fast-paced, algorithm-driven world I often find myself rushing off to find something new. What impresses me about your work is how the smallest differences in color, shape, and yarn can completely change the look and feel of your work. On your Instagram, you said “If I fall in love with a stitch pattern, you bet I’m going to squeeze every last drop out of it until I’m satisfied” How do you constantly push yourself to play with different variants of a motif while still keeping it interesting for yourself?
Many swatches and many versions of the same concept, often in different types of yarns just to see how the fiber’s characteristics affect things, is a really enjoyable part of the process. I love picking up a skein of new-to-me yarn just to experiment with, and it never fails to surprise me just how much a yarn’s weight, fiber type, and the way it was spun affects a given stitch pattern and the resulting fabric it creates.
Q: If you could make a yarn inspired by yourself, what would it look/feel like and what would the color name be?
I regularly dream about a richly dyed, inky-black yarn with the metallic/iridescent rainbow of an oil slick at certain angles. I’d call it Grackle (have you seen their feathers—they are beyond beautiful). It would be a tweedy, woolen-spun heathered wool, maybe blended with tussah or alpaca, and fingering or sport weight (versatile); or possibly a fuzzy, decadent fluff that is my other current obsession, brushed suri alpaca (the aptly-named Oh Dang lives rent free in my head and on my needles, I cannot get enough of that yarn).
Q: You’ve recently announced that you’ve taken on the role of art director for Peace Fleece and Harrisville Designs, noting that this has allowed you to pull back from a rapid release schedule into a slower and more organic approach to pattern releases. Congratulations on the new position! In what ways do you think this will change, impact, and/or improve your upcoming designs?
I’m still working towards that elusive work-life balance we all dream about. Does it exist on this timeline? I hope so. I think for a lot of designers it’s all too easy to get swept up into the idea that if you’re not producing constantly, everyone will forget about you, or you’ll starve, or (insert tragedy here). Allowing inspiration to drive my output, even if it means new pattern releases are farther between, is pure oxygen in my days. Ironically, I find that ideas come forward more frequently and are executed more easily in the abundance of free space given to explore them organically. I think that’s just the natural habitat of creators and any endeavor in making. I want that for every single one of us.
It does take the pressure off of me to produce to the volume I’ve put out in years past, which was not always healthy or sustainable. It encourages me to stretch myself beyond my own introverted comfort boundaries and reach out to other designers I admire and would love to work with, who I think might enjoy working and designing with our yarns in a collaborative spirit that respects independence and comes authentically from the heart. This translates without fail into patterns that knitters really enjoy.
Q: What non-fiber artists (musicians, poets, chefs, etc.) inspire your work and why?
I’m also obsessed with the work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and other surrealist women artists; Pamela Colman Smith, artist behind the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. Hiyao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, for obvious reasons I will go on too long about here, so I won’t!
Other artists whose work I admire: Katherine Duclos (IG: @katherine_duclos_rose) who I discovered through her Lego work, but I also deeply appreciate her thoughts on navigating life as an artist with autism, and being the parent of autistic children. Her transparency and willingness to share her humanity and life experiences and how they relate to her work is something I deeply admire. Sarah Burns (IG: @ sarahburnsstudio), a landscape artist based in Scotland, whose YouTube and Patreon content inspires me to pick up the paintbrush and explore painting in gouache and watercolor, and consciously study and think about color, value, and composition in a way that leads back to how I approach my design work. Whit Hayward, who many knitters know from her work as creative director at Harrisville Designs and other yarn companies and who is one of my closest friends, and who has gone on to pursue a career as a tattoo artist (IG: @ w.stone.tattoo). She is one of the most inspiring people I’ve been fortunate to know in this life, and the energy she generates makes me remember what it is to be genuinely excited to create things.
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Leila's Socials