Wednesday 23 March 2011

Silhouettes


Webs

Samples based on spiderswebs, but enlarged as a play on scale:

Sample development



I developed my print samples into this long print, about 2m in length, the transfer print has been repeated throughout, with the ink fading out as the print goes on. The knit sample used in the print also transferred some ink creating a background print aswell.

Saturday 19 March 2011

Time is running out...

We have about a week and a half left before the hand in date and the workload just gets heavier. After monday's crit I felt energised and excited about getting on with my final pieces, full of ideas from my peers and tutors, I was ready to just get my head down and work non-stop for the next couple of weeks. However, about 3 days later I realised just how much work there is to do and began to question just how much can one person do. Hasn't been a good week in terms of getting work done; knitting takes ages, Harrow and Romford are really far apart, St Patricks night is the most depressing night to work on, tutors can easily destroy my work timetables, chains are really hard to knit, and sheep are damn hard to get hold of. Oh and I still haven't had responses from two Unis which is basically preventing me from concentrating on anything for more than 2 minutes as I now check my emails obsessively, I hope they realise how cruel they're being....

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Working to the body

I decided to place my larger samples to the body to see how they work as fashion samples. This also develops the idea of scale.









This last sample reminds me of this designers work:

Hanako Narahiri

yay for happy coincidences!

FMP

Some pages/samples from my research sketchbook:




I have also been fighting with this sample for a couple of weeks now, as it was huge and so difficult knit, it is made from 1.5mm foam rod:

Knit Prints

I decided to bring some of my larger knit samples back to 2D to see how they work as prints. I made a number of transfer prints using photocopies of my samples and actual knit samples too.

Tuesday 8 March 2011

Knitting Looms

I recently bought a set of circular knitting looms, mostly out of curiosity, and set to work on some circular knits. I made a piece using a variety of stitches; garter, purl and ladder types, to create a tube thing, which I like to think of as a snood or scarf.

During a tutorial it was also suggested that I should transform my samples into outfits for dogs, seeing as I don't have a dog I decided to use one of my cats as a model...this was the only picture I got before he managed to slide out of it...
not a happy kitty...

Monday 7 March 2011

Giles Deacon

Somehow he managed to slip out of my head (and everyone elses for that matter) when it came to looking for inspiring knit designs for research. His designs are exactly what I mean by extreme knitting.



I also found an image of a combination of Giles Deacon and another favorite Sandra Backlund, this image is perfect for my final major project:

Sunday 6 March 2011

Giant Knitting Samples

I've been working with the idea of finger knitting then knitting with it. I used an ordinary, relatively thin yarn to begin with, then knitted it using 20mm needles. I used a variety of stitches; plain and purl, ladder and mesh type stitches too.
front
back
I then finger knitted a much thicker yarn and knitted with it. After a discussion with my tutor I decided to mix the materials I used in my samples, so there was a variety of weight as well as stitch. For this sample I used finger knitted thick yarn, strips of organza, bin bags and thick yarn.




As the yarn was so thick my largest needles were not large enough to knit it, soo I took a trip to B&Q and bought a 32mm x 2m plumbing pipe, some gaffer tape and a junior hacksaw and got to work on making my own needles. As awkward and odd as they look, they did the job and using them wasn't as difficult as I imagined it would be.