knitting

Posts tagged
with knitting

Art

Loose Knits Flow from Hands and Needles in Glass Sculptures by Carol Milne

“Sweet Spot,” kiln cast lead crystal and knitting needles, 16 x 21 x 11 inches. All images © Carol Milne, shared with permission

Carol Milne’s knit pieces might resemble your grandmother’s afghans but certainly aren’t as soft or pliable. The Seattle-based artist (previously) utilizes kiln cast lead crystal to create her loose weaves of translucent, color-coordinated glass. They often flow down from the hands and knitting needles they’re fashioned on, giving the feeling that the works could expand with just a few more stitches.

“I see my knitted work as metaphor for social structure. Individual strands are weak and brittle on their own, but deceptively strong when bound together,” Milne writes in a statement. “You can crack or break single threads without the whole structure falling apart. And even when the structure is broken, pieces remain bound together. The connections are what bring strength and integrity to the whole and what keep it intact.” Some of the artist’s knitted glass pieces will be on view from March 6 to May 1 at Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, North Carolina. Until then, head to Instagram to see more of her delicate pieces.

“Day & Night” (2018), kiln cast lead crystal and knitting needles, 16 x 12 x 10 inches

“Day & Night” (2018), kiln cast lead crystal and knitting needles, 16 x 12 x 10 inches

“Handknit,” kiln cast lead crystal & knitting needles

“Handknit,” kiln cast lead crystal & knitting needles

“Warped (Warp Knitting)” (2019), kiln cast lead crystal, stainless steel wall mount, and knitting needles, 12.5 x 12 x 3 inches

“Sphere Delight,” kiln cast lead crystal, 19 x 19 x 19 inches

“Waterwings,” kiln cast lead crystal and knitting needles, 8 x 19 x 12 inches

“Cloak & Dagger,” kiln cast lead crystal and knitting needles, 15.5 x 20 x 10 inches

Craft Science

People Are Knitting, Crocheting, and Weaving Tangible Records of Temperature Changes

Image © Josie George

In an effort to make the ongoing effects of climate change more visible, needleworkers around the globe are creating temperature blankets and scarves that track local weather patterns. Earlier this month, writer Josie George began an expansive Twitter thread about the project, motivating others to share their similar work. “I decided that this year, every day, I would knit a row on a scarf to mark the corresponding daily temperature/weather of my town,” George wrote in the original post. “It felt like a good way to engage with the changing climate and with the changing year. A way to notice and not look away.”

Although the technique and materials vary, each project follows a basic pattern utilizing a key (like this free one) to track some combination of the temperature, sky conditions, season, and date. The personal projects are part of a larger movement to document micro weather changes that may serve as indicators of broader climate issues. Groups like The Tempestry Project have been crafting wallhangings tracking the daily high temperature of a specific location during the course of year, weaving the results into a yarn-based work resembling a bar graph. Check out this Instagram tag to see more of the activism-inspired projects. (via My Modern Met)

Image © Josie George

Image © qp nell

Image © Rachel Chilton

Image © Annie S

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ali (@alisblanketbox) on Jan 16, 2020 at 6:18am PST

Art Craft

Knitted Camouflage’s Models Blend into the Background in a New Art Book

Last year, we shared Joseph Ford and Nina Dodd’s collaborative project that featured people sporting custom-knit ensembles that perfectly melded with their environment. Since then, the photographer and knitter duo have been hard at work creating new pairings that disguise watermelons as bananas, farmers as their cows, and commuters as the escalators they ascend. Invisible Jumpers, their book published by Hoxton Mini Press, documents the Knitted Camouflage project’s best work. See more from the series on Ford’s website and Instagram and pick up a book from Hoxton (currently shipping internationally) or place a pre-order for U.S. delivery on Amazon.

Art

A Towering Multi-Chromatic Tapestry of Giant Inflated Tubes Unveiled by Pneuhaus

Pneuhaus (previously) builds inflatable structures and environments that give their audience a new perspective of the world around them. Recently, the Rhode Island-based design collective honored Providence’s history of textile manufacturing with a piece titled Pnit. The large-scale piece is illuminated by LED lights, and presents a macro exploration of a knitted form. Inflatable tubes cycle and out of each other along the wall of a concrete parking garage as they slowly rotate through different shades of yellows, greens, purples, and pinks.

“In our practice we push the boundaries of textile-based construction and so the image of the knitting swatch is also an ode to our love of fabrics, flexibility, and the strength of soft things,” Pneuhaus tells Colossal. “Pnit demonstrates these same qualities of textiles through its calligraphic curves and its weather ready durability.”

The installation was created for Providence’s art festival PVDFest, and will continuously introduce new color patterns throughout its five-month run. You can see a video of the color-changing tapestry in the video below, and view more work by Pneuhaus, such as their 2018 geodesic pinhole camera, on their website and Instagram.

Craft Food

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

Photo by Emma Wood

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)

Photo by Emma Wood

Photo by Emma Wood

Photo by Emma Wood

Photo by Emma Wood

Photo by Emma Wood

Photo by Emma Wood      

Photo by Emma Wood

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.