knitting

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Craft Food

Crocheted Seafood and Knitted Loaves Top the Menu of Kate Jenkins’s Food-Focused Exhibitions

Brighton, England-based textile artist Kate Jenkins has been recreating veggies, seafood, and other favorite foods in wool for the last 12 years. Jenkins got her start in knitwear design, but has begun to focus on knitting feasts rather than fashions. In 2015 Jenkins made her largest installation to date, crocheting dozens of sardines, mussels, clams, shrimp, prawns, lobsters, crabs and other delights from the sea for a full-size fish counter titled “Kate’s Place the Stitchmongers” in Alexander Palace in London. For inspiration Jenkins knits or crochets from life, always purchasing the food she plans on recreating for accurate scale and texture.

Jenkins is currently working on her follow-up exhibition to “Kate’s Place” titled “Kate’s Bakes” which will switch from seafood to wheat in a life-size bakery that will be exhibited at the Handmade Festival in Barcelona this May. She hopes to tour the piece around the world, stopping in London, Paris, and New York, and incorporate localized treats for each destination. If you like Jenkins’s immersive knitting and crocheting experiences you might also like Lucy Sparrow’s felted corner stores and bodegas which have popped up in both London and New York. You can see more of Jenkins’s crocheted treats on her website and Instagram. (via Atlas Obscura)

Craft Science

A Scientifically Accurate Hand-Knit Sculpture of the Human Brain by Dr. Karen Norberg

In 2009, Psychiatrist Dr. Karen Norberg from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts decided to create a fibrous doppelgänger of the human brain. Using different colored yarns she knit together the two-sided organ one and a half times its normal size, with a cerebellum and spinal cord attached at the end. Dr. Norberg told the Telegraph that the piece was a labor of love. For me, there were two humorous aspects,” she explained. “One was simply to undertake such a ridiculously complex, time consuming project for no practical reason. The second was the idea of making a somewhat mysterious and difficult object – a brain – out of a ‘cuddly,’ cheerful, familiar material like cotton yarn.”

Dr. Norberg created the individual parts of the brain, such as the brainstem and amygdala, before sewing the lightly colored pieces together in its final form. A comparison of the textile sculpture alongside scans from a real human brain can be seen in the image below. (via Women’s Art)

Design

Cyclo Knitter: A Bicycle-Based Machine That Knits a Scarf in Five Minutes

The Cyclo Knitter is a bicycle-based machine by design student George Barratt-Jones. The contraption is made from a simple combination of wood and bike parts, and allows one to knit a scarf through light exercise. Barratt-Jones came up with the idea one day while waiting for the train in Eindhoven. His invention allows other riders to stay warm while passing time on the platform, and step away with a winter accessory.

If you like this creative knitting mechanism, check out the Rocking Knit, a rocking chair designed by Damien Ludi and Colin Peillex that converts rocking into knitted hats.

 

Art

Nora Fok’s Ethereal Hand-Knit Jewelry is Inspired by Nature and Science

Nora Fok combines jewelry design with textile art in her science- and math-inspired wearable artworks. Fok, who is based in southeast England, works in her home studio creating all of her pieces manually, using hand tools, fine nylon microfilament and basic processes like weaving, knitting, braiding, and knotting. The work above is comprised of 3,500 knit spheres, and finished pieces can take weeks to produce. The artist describes her inspiration on her website:

She is intrigued by the world around her; she also asks questions and tries to find answers to them. She is fascinated by different aspects of nature, structure, systems and order, and the mysteries and magic which she sets out to capture in her work.

Fok has artwork that is currently being shown in the Jewelry of Ideas exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, which is up through May 2018, and she shares exhibition dates and a small archive of jewelry on her website. If you like Nora’s work, also check out Mariko Kusumoto.

Craft Design Photography

Custom Hand-Knit Sweaters Blend Subjects into Urban Environments

Over the last four years, photographer Joseph Ford (previously) has collaborated with friend and knitter Nina Dodd to create a project that blends models into their environments rather than having them stand out. Each subject wears a custom hand-knit sweater by Dodd that transforms their torso, partially camouflaging their body into a highly textured wall, striped running track, or for one pooch—the leaves of dense shrub.

The series, Knitted Camouflage, also features a collaboration with French street artist Monsieur Chat who painted one of his trademark cats on the wall of a derelict factory for the photographer. You can take a peek behind the scenes of Ford’s photographic projects on his Facebook and Instagram.

Craft Design

Kniterate: A New Digital Knitting Machine Lets You ‘Print’ Fashion Designs

Kniterate is a compact industrial knitting machine created for designers and entrepreneurs that facilitates the one-off creation of garments. Built by London-based designer Gerard Rubio, Kniterate is meant to act as a sort of 3D printer for knitwear, allowing you to create digital designs in Photoshop and turn them into a wearable garments in just a few hours. The machine is capable of knitting scarves, sweaters, dresses, ties, or even the components of shoes. Kniterate could dramatically reduce lead time for a fashion business or design school in need of quick prototyping, or help a more ambitious artist in the fabrication a completely unique wardrobe. Learn more over on Kickstarter. (via Inhabitat, Make:)

Design

A Rocking Chair That Knits You a Hat as You Read the Paper

Two longtime porch activities are now combined into one simple contraption thanks to designers Damien Ludi and Colin Peillex, creators of the Rocking Knit. The wooden rocking chair is rigged to knit as you sway back and forth, producing a cap from minimal energy output. The invention was produced as a part of Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne‘s Low-Tech Factory, a workshop that encourages students from the industrial design program to invent simple machines that at once create an experience and a material good. Ludi and Peillex premiered their contraption at Designer’s Saturday in Langenthal, Switzerland and produced a video that demonstrates their invention below. (via My Modern Met)