From Fire to Form: How the Phoenix Pathways MKAL Was Born

Some designs arrive fully formed—clean, orderly, obedient to intention. Phoenix Pathways did not.

It arrived as a feeling first. A pressure in the chest. A low, persistent hum beneath everything else I was trying to make, write, or move past. It arrived as grief that refused to stay quiet, as healing that didn’t follow a straight line, as the slow realization that becoming is rarely neat—or painless.

For years, I have carried a phoenix on my arm—inked into my skin long before I understood the full weight of what it would come to mean. I chose it once as a symbol of resilience. I live with it now as a witness: to loss, to fire, and to survival that doesn’t erase what came before.

The Phoenix Pathways MKAL grew out of that journey—not the triumphant rise we like to celebrate, but the long, complicated road that leads there.

The Need for a Different Kind of Project

I didn’t want to design something that rushed to redemption. I didn’t want a pattern that pretended healing happens all at once, or that transformation is tidy. I wanted a project that honored the in-between—the unraveling, the sifting, the quiet rebuilding that happens stitch by stitch.

Because life itself is a mystery while you’re living it, a mystery knit-along felt like the right choice. You don’t get the full picture at the beginning. You make choices without knowing how they’ll resolve. You trust the process, or you don’t—but either way, you keep going.

Phoenix Pathways became a way to practice that kind of trust.

When the Process Became the Proof

What I didn’t expect—what I couldn’t have planned—was how closely the design process itself would mirror the grief I was walking through at the same time.

It was painstaking. Slow. Often discouraging.

Initial concepts were scrapped entirely. Not refined—abandoned. I made so many swatches. I worked through so many stitch patterns. Some promising. Some dead ends. Some that held for a moment before collapsing under their own weight. There were days it felt like nothing would ever settle into place. Like every idea unraveled the moment I tried to hold it too tightly.

And then—finally—the pieces began to align.

The structure clarified. The emotional arc made sense. The stitch patterns I had been developing felt right in my hands, as if they had been waiting for me to catch up to them. I began working on the sample with a sense of quiet certainty: This is it.

That’s when I lost my design journal.

The one notebook that held everything. Detailed notes. Charts. The logic behind the stitch patterns I had created—patterns that were unlike anything I’d worked with before. I searched everywhere. Retraced steps. Opened boxes. Emptied bags. No matter how many times I tried, I could not recreate those stitches from memory alone.

The journal was never found.

It felt devastating in a way that surprised me—not just inconvenient, not just frustrating, but deeply, achingly familiar. The sudden absence. The knowledge that something irreplaceable was gone. The helplessness of knowing that no amount of effort could bring it back.

So, I did what grief has taught me to do, again and again.

I started over.

I set out to create entirely new stitch patterns. Again. From scratch. With tired hands and a heart that already knew the shape of loss too well. And slowly—almost imperceptibly—something else emerged. Not a replica of what had been lost, but something different. Something shaped by the knowing. By the fire already survived.

In hindsight, I can see clearly that Phoenix Pathways could never have been designed any other way. Because that is the truth of this path—creatively and personally. Things fall apart. What you thought you would carry forward disappears. You grieve it. You curse it. You wish it back. And then, when there is nothing left to do but keep moving, you build again with what remains.

Not unchanged. But still capable of becoming.

Making as Meaning-Making

At its heart, Phoenix Pathways is about using our hands to process what our words sometimes cannot. About letting repetition soothe the nervous system. About allowing color, texture, and rhythm to hold what feels too heavy to carry alone.

This MKAL isn’t about perfection. It isn’t about speed. It isn’t about proving anything.

It’s about showing up.

For yourself. For your story. For the quiet truth that making can be both refuge and reckoning.

Why a Community Matters

I chose to host this as a shared experience because healing—like creativity—doesn't happen in isolation. There is something powerful about knowing others are working through the same clues, the same uncertainty, the same trust in the unfolding.

Different yarns. Different hands. Different lives.

One shared path.

Phoenix Pathways was born from ashes, yes—but more importantly, it was born from listening. To what my body needed. To what my heart refused to bypass. To the belief that design can be both noun and verb: something made, and something that makes us.

If you are walking your own path right now—whatever stage you’re in—you are welcome here.

We’ll take it one stitch at a time.