My Deco City shawl pattern, originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly's gorgeous Winter 2015 issue, is now available as a single pattern download on Ravelry. There is one change to the new version of the pattern: this time it includes charts as well as the written instructions. As a chart-lover, I like to include them whenever I can! You can read all about the shawl and its inspiration in my post from last November: New pattern: Deco City.
Before I sent my shawl off to Pom Pom, we did a little photoshoot of our own in Melbourne's St Kilda, which has some interesting Art Deco buildings including the Palais Theatre. It was incredibly windy, so we used the wind to our advantage...
As you can imagine, it takes a lot of shots to get a shawl to look good in the wind, without having the lace design hidden or all of my hair in my face. :)
We also found this amazing architectural confection on the little lawn outside Luna Park:
You can find the Deco City pattern and the whole Winter 2015 issue here on Ravelry, and paper copies of the magazine are available through Pom Pom Quarterly's website and awesome yarn shops.
Have you heard about the WARM project? It's a community textile art project to reflect on climate change and sustainability, which will take the form of two giant pictures made up of small knitted parts, to be installed in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery this September. You can read about the inspiration for the project here.
My contribution is a batch of knitted gum leaves. I've made six small ones so far, which I'll put in the post today. If I have time, I'd like to make another batch of leaves.
I found some fallen leaves and flowers under the gum trees at our train station today, very conveniently for my photos!
If you'd like to knit something to contribute to WARM, you can find the all of the patterns (devised by Georgie Nicholson) here on Ravelry - you can make different kinds of native flowers, or wind turbines, or simple lace squares for example. All items need to be made from 100% wool yarn, and using stash yarn is encouraged. Contributions are due by the 12th of August.
You guys, I actually finished a garment! This only happens once or twice a year, I am sloooow when it comes to garment knitting - mostly because I have so many other things I want to knit, and if they're my own designs I prioritise them. Which is totally great! But I think I need to get back to doing purely ME-knitting on the weekends, because I'd love a couple more jerseys and cardies in my wardrobe.
This is my Royally Striped cardie, designed by Stephen West and knit in a combo of Morris and Sons Norway 8ply (the natural charcoal and brown colours) and Vintage Purls Max (the burgundy and golds). The golds are actually the leftovers from my Beeswax Set, now put to good use. :)
Isn't this mural neat? It's across the train tracks from our place, on the side of some storage units. I like the little people climbing around in the eucalyptus branches.
Royally Striped is an all-in-one-piece design, where you knit one section and then pick up stitches for the next section. It's quite magical, the way it grows and grows. I really like the i-cord bind off around all of the edges, it finishes it off really tidily. I did add a big wooden button, but I prefer the way it looks unbuttoned.
The striped short-row wedges were fun to knit - don't they look cool?
Here's a closer look at the back, with its block of colourful narrow stripes:
I do love the cuddliness of garter stitch!
Next up will be another one of these. Not as exciting (especially as I've knit one before), but it will be a great basic super-wearable jersey. And my yarn is speckled, so scratch that - it IS exciting!
I have a pretty-pictures post for you today! I visited the NGV on Sunday after choir, and saw an exhibition that's been on my to-see list for a while.
Blue: Alchemy of a Colour definitely lived up to my textile/dye geek expectations, once my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. I really enjoyed seeing all the different textile decoration techniques from various places and time periods - and it was so much easier to see the details and differences in real life. Being able to see the texture of the fabric from various angles makes such a difference. That said, I hope you find my photos interesting! ;)
Most of the fabrics below are dyed with indigo. This beautiful kimono and wall hanging were decorated using resist techniques, which you can read about here: Resist-Dyed Textiles.
And here are examples of ikat fabric, where the threads are resist-dyed in a pattern prior to weaving. You can find out about how it's made in this photo gallery: Making Ikat Cloth.
The 'rag kimono' below is an example of boro patchwork, a traditional Japanese form of visible mending. You can see the parallel lines of running stitch holding the layers together in the close-up photo.
This quilted bodice with indigo-dyed silk ribbons and 18thC embroidered bedspread are just too pretty, especially with the depth of colour in the ribbons. I recognised the bedspread from last year's 'Exquisite Threads' embroidery exhibition...
Lastly, I had a look at the ceramics. This article on the exhibition describes the use of cobalt in ceramic decoration, which goes back over 1,000 years. The 18thC Delft tiles were especially cute! I've included by favourite below...
If you're curious about indigo dyeing, here are a couple of videos I found interesting. The first is about cloth-dyeing in India, and the second (specially for my fellow knitters) is about dyeing yarn. I must get some real indigo yarn to play with!
It's March, and for those of us in choir-land that means the countdown to Holy Week has begun. As well as our St John Passion performance on Good Friday, my choir at the Scots' Church is doing a few Bach cantatas spaced throughout the year. We did one last Sunday - the first half of BWV 147, 'Hertz und Mund und Tat und Leben' - and it was really lovely to sing. The opening chorus was fast and exciting with its trumpet solos, and the final chorale was just beautiful. Definitely worth getting up at 7am on a Sunday. ;)
There's a video of us singing & playing the final chorale here on Facebook, courtesy of our organist Ria. The tune is best known as "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" - you might recognise it when you hear it. I remember coming across a piano arrangement at Nana's house many years ago and playing it on the dodgy old piano...
This is a video of the whole cantata, performed by The Sixteen:
I'm glad it won't be my first time singing the St John Passion this year, there aren't many weeks left now to brush up on my German (not to mention all of the notes). I'm also glad we have more than one special rehearsal scheduled this time in addition to the Sunday morning run-throughs.
One of my favourite Bach interpreters, John Butt and his Dunedin Consort, have recorded a liturgical reconstruction of the St John Passion. Here's a short intro video with some rehearsal clips:
After filling my head with all of this music, I'm going to be super-primed for a very, very exciting trip... This April I'll be heading off on my first trip to Europe with Willie and Julian! I really can't believe it's actually happening. We'll start with a visit to Berlin where Chloe and Celena live, and spend three weeks exploring a few different cities including Florence, Rome, and Amsterdam, with short stops in Leipzig and Munich. It was incredibly hard to narrow down our list of places to visit, but I prioritised the places with the art and architecture I most want to see (as a consequence of my years of studying music and art history and Latin).
In Leipzig I plan to visit the Bach Museum, the Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche, a museum of musical instruments, and a music bookshop. And hopefully a coffeehouse or two!
More on the trip later. For now I need to work on my German and Italian (both beginner-level, alas) and do some more plotting and planning...
On Saturday Willie and I went for a mini road trip to the Dandenong Ranges, which are about an hour out of Melbourne. Willie has been making a list of nearby-ish gardens and bird sanctuaries and the like, which we might want to go and visit. For this outing, we chose the National Rhododendron Garden.
Lots of photos ahead! Click to enlarge them. :)
It wasn't very busy, as the cherry blossoms and most of the rhododendrons have yet to flower, so it was the perfect place for a low-key late afternoon stroll. The first moment of excitement (after sniffing several daphne bushes) was this lovely kookaburra who was keeping an eye on us from its tree:
It looks so much like a puppet or soft toy! What a cutie.
The garden is made up of different areas, featuring different kinds of plants. Massed hellebores under trees, a reedy lake, and long stretches of daffodils under the cherry trees...
I really loved finding unfamiliar trees, like this hornbeam with its very vertical branches, some flowering witch hazels, and some interesting conifers I'd never come across before:
Now I know what fake Christmas trees are modelled after!
Before making our way back through the garden and home (via a great fish-and-chip shop), we paused for a rest by the camellias. Willie took a few snaps of me in my green woolly hat, which I realised I hadn't shown off yet. It's a simple ribbed beanie in Brooklyn Tweed's Shelter. The colour is called 'Button Jar', and the pattern is Swoon. I think it's just right. :)
My latest shawl pattern is out, and I love it to bits! This is Spacedust, a lace mesh shawl with textured 'stripes' at one end.
Features:
asymmetric triangular shape, knit on the bias
lace mesh and textured stitch patterns (both easily memorised)
end-to-end construction, beginning at the longest point
a one-skein project, requiring 410 yards of fingering-weight yarn
suitable for variegated yarn, as well as solid and semi-solid colours
one size, easily altered by working more or fewer repeats
full written and charted instructions
I designed this shawl to show off a very cool skein of speckle-dyed sock yarn from Skein
- it's their BFL Sock in 'Neon + Grey'. I really love speckle-dyed yarn
at the moment! It's a yarn trend I am very much on board with.
The
main stitch pattern in my Spacedust shawl is 'Star Rib Mesh' lace,
which makes the shawl very airy and also allows one to get a pretty big
shawl out of only one skein. This stitch pattern works very well with
the variegated yarn.
We had a lot of fun taking the photos for this design! Julian suggested a motorway underpass which he was keen to explore. It had a lot of cool concrete textures, and best of all, giant colourful sculptures which we'd seen from the car before but never close up. Apparently they're known as the 'red sticks' or 'cheese sticks' (or, officially, as the 'Gateway'). I've been calling them 'the chip and the sauce'. ;)
I have another new shawl design to share: Lunate, a one-skein fingering weight shawl shaped like the crescent moon.
I kept this design quite simple, with a stockinette ground and lace mesh accents. Lunate is a very straightforward knit - most of the shawl is made
up of the same two rows repeated.
Counting is minimal, as stitch markers tell you when to work the lace
parts, and each wrong-side row is a purled 'rest' row.
Features:
curved crescent shape which drapes beautifully
simple lace mesh and stockinette textures
top-down construction, beginning with a garter tab cast-on
a one-skein project, requiring 410 yards of fingering-weight yarn
one size, easily enlarged by working more repeats
written pattern only (for greater simplicity in this case)
I used one skein of Vintage Purls Sock in a pale greyish-yellow called 'Jaune D'antimoine' - perfect for a lunar shawl! The simple textures of Lunate would also work well with a speckled or variegated yarn.
We took the photos at Yarra Bend Park, a bat sanctuary and lovely bit of nature close to the city. I blogged about my first visit earlier this year. We had great fun taking photos at different spots on the riverbank, exploring, and watching the bats.
The samplers were one of the most interesting parts of the NGV's historical embroidery exhibition. They were displayed in a table-height cabinet with seats so people can take their time examining them. They're very much a display of skill and invention, as well as part of an embroiderer's education - the fine detail in them was seriously impressive, especially as some were made by children! Just mind-boggling.
I've included some close-ups as well as photos of the whole samplers. Click to enlarge...
The lacy background is made of teeny-tiny patterns of holes!
