Sammy and Other Beauties

Hello! HAPPY NEW YEAR you guys! It's been a very VERY long time since I last posted anything, but you know what, I've been as busy as a bee. It breaks my heart that I can't always post things that I'm dead excited about straight away, but if people have ordered things as presents, which they often do, it's better that I don't give the game away. Even though no one probably is likely to look at my little blog anyway. But just to be sure.

So I have a little round up of bits. I will try and be a bit less scatty about things this year, and post regularly, and all that business. I think I did all right last year. But if I'm as busy for the rest of 2012 as I have been this January, phewf! I will be delighted.

Anyway. First up, do you remember the graceful beauty of Sammy? He is my friend Catherine's dog, he lives in a youth hostel, he is a lucky boy. He enjoys dancing and lying in the middle of the floor and going to the pub. After I knitted his royal portrait, Catherine tried to coerce Sammy into posing with it, like a true aristocrat.



So handsome.

Here you can see Sammy a bit better but the knitted drawing is slightly out of view.



Looking good there Sammy. I can't wait to see this now that it's been framed, I don't think I have ever had a piece of work framed before. A milestone!

Right, some monsters next. I hardly did any monsters before Christmas, but the ones I did make I was very proud of.

This one turned out wicked but I can't tell you who it is or anything about it because I'm paranoid so I'm keeping it on the DL... ssshhhh.







All very covert. I like him though! Looka them pointy toes!

This next one was a commission for Ruth, for her cousin in the USA. I enjoyed making her but as usual I have failed to take a very good quality photo. Oh well.





Both of those photos missing a foot off, nice one Helen. You get the general idea. She's lovely and purple/blue/yellow, a colour combo I can get on board with. She's sitting on the back of my sofa here in the absence of a proper set-up. It's REAL velour.

Finally I did a couple of craft fairs in December, which I have already waffled about slightly. I like to knit at craft fairs and generally end up with a load of hats and stuff. This year I came out of my craft fair experience with these beauties:





And gloves:







I have chucked all these lovely things in my Folksy shop if you know anyone in the market for a lurid technicolour bit of knitwear, except the Russian doll mittens which Emily snaffled off me the other day. Just a little plugette there.

So that's what I've been making the last month or so, hope you liked it. I have other things too but this is getting quite boringly long now, plus it's taking me ages to root through every blimmin' folder on my computer looking for photos that I have hidden somewhere in error. So I will leave it here for now. Bye bye, bye bye, bye bye. xx

Some very simple binary knitting by an idiot

Hello. I have embarked on a new knitting project, which I think will take me forever and may in fact be a stupid idea. I don't normally do things like this, usually it's all 'hey look at this silly monster!' and 'I done a knitted drawing of an alien eating custard!!' and 'come to my craft stall and buy finger puppets!!!' and this week I have changed tack a bit. See what you think, see what you think.

So I am making lots and lots of nearly identical tiny knitted drawings, but none of them are identical, and none of them will look like anything. In fact I am making every possible permutation of two colours and nine stitches, which will be 512, won't it binary fans! When I was little, my dad taught me how to count in binary on my fingers and sometimes I do it to calm myself down when I can't sleep and feel mental. It's kind of like counting sheep but with fingers, and you can get up to 1023 on 10 fingers. Try it! It's not fun but it wastes some time. Anyway, I currently feel mental all the time and can't sleep ever, so I was doing this the other night, imagining my fingers in the dark (like you do) and I got it into my head to make a sort of knitted sequence, counting in binary. So using two colours to represent 1s and 0s, and just... count up to whatever.

The working title for this piece is Every Knitted Drawing Possible With Two Colours and Nine Stitches. It's not very succinct but I'll think of something else, so don't worry. I'm kind of stretching the term 'drawing' a bit here, but that's okay. I am using nine stitches because they make a nice square drawing. I will have 511 squares at the end, plus 0, so 512 in total. So far I have made 86. They're really small.

All terribly exciting, right? Definitely not dull as shit is it! Here, let me show you!


So this is 0, you see.


One.


Two.


Three: one plus two, innit.


Four.


And skipping ahead a bit:


Twenty three.

And again.


Eighty.

I started off without the red frame at first and just tried to make squares with nine stitches, but it's impossible to make them look like anything worth looking at, you just end up with a mess like this:



Whaaaaat. It's not even square and you can't see where the green stitches are supposed to be. I stopped this after I'd made about fifteen (I know, I know, but I don't like giving up). Then I stuck some red stitches round the edge and never looked back.

So they look kind of boring at the moment and all I know is that I've got loads of them all over the place and am cataloguing them in little packets so they don't get too mixed up. I have a few ideas about how to finish it and display the squares, all of which completely disagree with one another, so I'm going to have a think, but right now I have to concentrate on making another 425 squares. And getting a job. I have to concentrate on getting a job.

Well I hope you like the beginning stages of my little project. I really like it, I think it'll be quite cool when it's finished, although they don't look very interesting at the moment. JUST BE PATIENT. Anyway that's me. Have a nice weekend. x

Big Sammy!

Hello. I have been doing another knitted drawing, a little one, for Catherine. She has a big silly dog called Sammy, and she wanted a knitted representation of him in lurid technicolour. Well, I added the technicolour bit, that's how I do things y'see. I have met Sammy twice. The first time he lolloped about and made me nervous. The second time he sat nicely and only tried to eat an entire cake once.

Here is beautiful Sammy, posing for his royal portrait.



His front feet and tail are missing off this photo but you can imagine what they look like.

So what I did next was draw Sammy onto some squared paper and then colour in all the squares methodically. I decided to go for blue and green, told Catherine I was going to knit it with dark blue and greys (so it wasn't all black), and then changed my mind afterwards. So here's that.



He's just such a fabulous model, I love it.

Then I knitted it. This turned out to be a harder task than I had anticipated, partly because I had accidentally coloured some squares half one colour and half another, so I had to kind of wing it in places. Came out all right though. I did it in four parts and sewed them together.



Looking at all the pictures together, it's kind of obvious that I forgot (again) that knit stitches are not square, they are wider than they are tall. So if you make a knitting pattern with square stitches, it will come out squatter and wider than it's supposed to. Luckily, this drawing is small enough that it doesn't really matter. It still looks like Majestic Sammy.

Just look at that face.



I haven't even showed this to Catherine yet but I hope she'll enjoy it. I hope Sammy feels that it is a flattering representation. I think it's quite funny to get a portrait of your pet made, especially a knitted one, but it's also kind of amazing. I might make a portrait of my parents' four cats sitting together like a nice family, and not running away from each other or smacking each other round the face like they do normally. Or all fighting to sit on my dad.

Unveiled! KNITTED DRAWING-O-RAMA!

Hey everybody, I finished it (weeks ago), sewed all the ends in, and FINALLY got around to bringing it round to Nic's house for a photoshoot. So the time has come!

**drum roll**

Hooray!





Int she a beaut! I will tell you a bit about her.

I wanted to recreate one of those 50s style adverts, or food packaging with a housewife-type holding a plate of cookies or whatever. I love packaging like this with big, bold lettering. And custard is suitably 50s and homemade and wholesome. The ladymonster, though (I should give her a name!) is eating the custard off her finger which is quite suggestive I suppose. I think of her as quite predatory, or at least confident. She is sexy despite being a total uggo. Her pose and cocky demeanour, which I have imagined, having spent HOURS in her company, is not ladylike or demure, as I guess the 50s housewife thing is supposed to suggest. However, at the same time, she's totally feminine, as indicated by the frilly pinny, the pink frock with all the curly bits, and the lovehearts. She may not be a lady, but she's all woman! I wish I was more like her!

The subject of women and femininity in art has been pored over for decades and I was going to go into it a bit here, but I don't want to churn out some old cliches or start drivelling on about feminism like a drunken, well, me, on a blog which is primarily about my silly knitted nonsense.

I am going to stop writing bollocks now because I feel like an idiot. Here, have some close-ups.









Aahhh. I'd like to exhibit this somewhere, it looks pretty cool in front of Nic's summer house but alas, it can't stay there. Does anyone have any ideas?

Finally, for scale, here's a picture of the drawing with me in front of it looking awkward.



It's very bright today and I've got the sun in my eyes.

Well anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. I think I'll go and do another one.

My Scruffy Flat and Other Stories

Hey. I haven't really got much to say right now, but I haven't written anything in a while, and I am avoiding any proper work. Also, I ate quite a lot of chocolate by accident before (I don't even remember buying it, I go into such a trance in Aldi) and I'm a bit sleepy. Just a heads up.

So I still haven't managed to take any proper photos of my knitted drawing, and I am reluctant to show you the shitty ones I took on the floor of my flat, because - well, they're shitty, and I don't want to OKAY. I also don't want to drag this out for the rest of eternity though, so I will endeavour to do it this week, not that anyone cares any more, probably!

Argh. If you remember, I started the drawing partly as a way to use up all the odds and ends of yarn that made up my 'stash' as they call it. I would say that this has been a failure. In the year since I started making it, I have accumulated about three times as much yarn as I had before, thanks to Laura, who moved into a van and gave me loads, and my auntie Brenda, who keeps me topped up with gigantic sackfuls every few months. Which is awesome and I'm mega grateful! I love you guys! I have a million tons of yarn all over the place though.

Speaking of which, last year I wrote this thoughtful and intriguing post about how I put all my yarn on different shelves in my cupboard, and how it had changed everything in my life for the better and things like that. Well, in the meantime I moved house and threw everything on the floor. A week ago, my workspace looked like this:



Ugh, rubbish, look at that tangle!



I like to call that a 'tanglabra'.

Anyway I am halfway through putting it all in cupboards now, which Nic gave me, since she is moving into a van too.

I am boring myself now, I will stop jabbering on about nothing in a minute. Here are some teaser photos for you though, from my 'Shitty Floor Photos'* collection, just to whet the whistle.







*my actual floor isn't shitty, just my photography skillzz innit.

Oh this again.

Hellooo, it's me. I feel a bit sick because I think I accidentally ate some milky sandwiches today, euurgh, yuck. They probably only had a bit of milk in them, but maybe I shouldna oughtna had five. Oh who cares.

Anyway I have been a busy bumblebee the last couple of weeks, when I'm not ingesting milk by mistake, and my knitted drawing is NEARING COMPLETION! Can you believe it. It has been over a year since I started it. I now have six squares to go. Yeahhhh! It looks pretty good, but I'm not going to show you it yet because it's so nearly finished that if I show you now, you'll be all like, yawn, whatevers, SEEN IT, when I finally unveil the finished product. And I do not want that, I want gasps of disbelief and gratitude, you know? So I'm going old school and showing you some very bad photos of some individual squareses.

Here:





This one is upside down.




Oh I wanted to show you this, some of the squares have so many different strands in that the back ends up looking like this:

Aaargh. I spend twenty minutes of every hour untangling it. It is Massively Laborious. But satisfying.

I am going to make a cup of tea now, so, bye bye.

Complete mayhem

Hi friends! It's been a long time since I updated this, but I've been so unbelievably busy that I think my head's going to pop. I've got a large commission which I'm in the middle of. As it's a number of monsters for Christmas presents, I can't really post pictures of them, not that anyone is likely to 1) look at my blog in the first place, and 2) recognise themselves from the dubious likeness of their monster, but you never know.

Anyway, I thought I would check in and see what going down in blog town. Before I started the big order, I did loads of my knitted drawing. Remember that!? I started this to record the completion of the drawing, as it's such a massive longwinded project, and then forgot all about it after about three posts and started making other things instead. However, rest assured it is still in production (phew) and I took a few photos this morning to show you.



So I'm nearly two thirds finished, I've done three squares for the fourth row which aren't sewn together yet. I pinned them to my duvet, put one of them in the wrong place, and then spent about ten minutes panicking because I thought I'd lost one of the squares, which as it turns out, I haven't even made yet.

What do you think of the ladymonster? She's hideous in't she?



Aauuugghhh!

I don't know why I've got such an attachment to her, but I love her. I think she's brilliant.

One more.



So I'm pretty pleased with how this is turning out so far. I've still got loaaaads of monsters to make, so I probably won't get any more knitted drawing done for a couple of months. However, I'm startled by the speed of my work this week, I've been more productive than I was before I started working full time. It's cool.

Well, best get back to it, those legs aren't going to crochet themselves! Bye.

Seam stitchin' agogo

Right, so I have now sewed the first ten squares together. The knitted drawing is becoming an actual, cohesive thing instead of just loads of squares that get lost constantly and do my head in. Now I have a massive big rectangle! Hooray.

Yesterday I decided that I needed a camera of my own if I was going to record this properly, so I bought one. It seems grand so far apart from that I nearly broke it straight away by putting the battery in the wrong way. But it means I can take photos of things as I finish them, instead of saving everything up for three weeks.

Okay so first things first, here are some photos of the top third of the drawing. It's pretty.



It's the entire length of my bed, look.



Who!



Lik!



Kes?




Lovely.

It's going to be the technicolour dreamblanket.

Also, I finished another square:



I may put the drawing on hold for a bit because I want to start making some other stuff, who knows what that will be, but I've got some embryonic ideas wriggling about in my brain. They are pretty irritating. I'd best get them out the way before anything too crazy happens. I will let you know what is happening, it'll be well exciting, promise.

Bye then.