Weaverly

Beaver Dams

A final stroll in Chesapeake City…

 

…and a visit to Vulcan's Rest Fibers, a really outstanding yarn store…

 

…and then on the road again. In the afternoon we stopped at Millstream Park in Centreville, walked along the millstream to a beaver dam, and enjoyed the peak autumn foliage.

 

 

A Very Scary Trunk

There are two wooden trunks in the spare room that are rarely opened; they serve as end tables and are normally piled high with books. Today I happened to open one of the trunks and found a huge stash of wool I'd forgotten about. This handspun yarn represents a small fraction of what was in there:

The rest is unspun wool in batts and roving. Just when I thought I'd finally gotten a handle on stash control… 

It's all in great condition, however, and smells pleasantly of cedar. I suppose you think this discovery will keep me from shopping at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair in Asheville in October. You will be wrong.

Scanner Games

Taking a deep breath. A pause in the action. Meanwhile, here is the result of some scanner play this afternoon. This is from a knitted doll from 20 years ago. The yarn is my handspun conglomeration of dyed wool and silkroving, loosely plied with a metallic thread. You can just see the glint of the metallic here and there. At full size (click to enlarge) this scan is around 10x magnification. 

Woven Animation I

You may recall my post of November 10, referring to this wonderful knitted animation on YouTube, and all the discussions that followed. 

I'm finally ready to begin my own woven animation project (can it really be 6 months?). I've taken 40 frames from a short video of Karl reading a Dr. Seuss book, and as a first step I've collaged them onto a single page. 

The next steps will be to prepare this page for weaving, then photographing or scanning the weaving, then recombining the single woven frames into a short (very short!) video. There are 40 frames, and at 10 fps that computes to 4 seconds of video. Crazy, you say? It's all about the process.

If this is remotely successful, I may call on some of you who had originally volunteered to participate, and perhaps together we can pad out this project into an epic two-minute film. Who knows?

Entertainment

Weaving is my passion and I'm deadly serious about it. But knitting is what I do for entertainment. I knit in the evenings when I'm listening to music, or in the car, or when sharing a glass of wine with friends. I enjoy small projects that use up bits and pieces of handspun yarn and make a dent in my button collection, such as these tiny pouches. 

They are from an ingenious pattern by Rita O'Connell: the Buttoned I-Cord Pouch. As Rita describes it, "This pouch was designed as a project to help you experience the versatility of I-cord." The construction is really clever: it starts with a flap knit sideways, then the I-cord is knit integrally around 3 sides of the flap (the buttonhole formed as a loop along the way), continuing in a ring which forms the "lip" of the bag. Then the body of the pouch is picked up from the i-cord ring and the flap, and knit circularly to the desired length, where it is kitchenered. It only takes an hour to make, and is such fun.

But We Really Need the Rain

What do you do to cheer yourself up when the weather is like this?

This is what I do:

Visionary Knitting

I just came across the amazing video Les peaux de lièvres from a Canadian group called "Tricot Machine" (Knitting Machine). As David at Dare to Care Records, producers of the video, explains, “We actually shot our characters on green screen to start with. Then we edited, keyed and composited in AE to add the other elements like snow and stadium. We then outputed 723 jpeg of the clip to our knitter that used them as templates for the knits.” The prodigious knitter is Lysanne Latulippe. Stop whatever you’re doing, do yourself a special favor, and watch the video. Watch it in high quality mode if you have a fast connection.

Les peaux de lièvres

Some of Dare to Care’s other productions have a textile sensibility. Roam around their website for some cool clips.

Department of What If:

We weavers could do something along these lines. All we'd have to do is weave 700 or so iterations of a design, each one slightly different from the one before, photograph them, and assemble them into an animation. Any volunteers? Maybe a study group? A guild project?