Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

On knitting. Again

While finishing the Drifting cardigan this loveliness was already calling me.


I had purchased five of these generous skeins, dyed by Plain&Fancy Sheep&Wool Co. at the Taos Wool Festival in 2012, plenty for a sweater. 
I decided to go without a pattern and to make this up, copying the fitting of a favorite shirt of mine.
There was swatching, measuring, calculating, sketching, more calculating. Then I re-calculated  (*sigh*, yes, way too much math, if you ask me), I cast on and voila!


 I hope that it will all come together, because this sure looks pretty! New Mexico colors, I think!


 As I went through my pictures I stumbled upon these from Christmas. There are always some hand knitted gifts like the dark blue and purple cowl that I made for my mom using some supersoft Malabrigo merino yarn from a yarn store in Hawaii. 
While it sure looks lovely, never mind me and my knits, cause I'm an old pro - here comes the exciting part...


What really means the world is a gift that my daughter gave her Oma. Because this girl started knitting just last year! 
It was really for the longest time just a piece of knitted fabric, that she kept working on to practice her new skill until just a week before Christmas. That's when she decided that she had to turn this thing into a Cowl/Neckwarmer/Miniscarf - capitalized, yes! - for Oma. With the obsession of a determined mind she went to work and finished the second half of the scarf just in time and she did it all by herself, even casting off! I only contributed by sewing on the button for closure - the girl had to sleep at some point!


That she chose to give her first ever knitted piece to her Oma meant so much to me, because, you know, that's where it comes from! The art, the knowledge, the wisdom of the working hands, it comes from the generations before us, from the women, who preserved it for us, the daughters and grand daughters.
Oma was a lucky woman this Christmas, but in fact we all are.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Quest

Do you as an artist feel like one day you will be There? You will have achieved your goals and your work will be perfect? I seriously doubt that there is one of you out there who answers yes to that question. I am sure that even the teachers among you will be the first to tell me that they never stop learning. 
Since I started my journey into rug hooking three years ago a whole new world to express myself has opened up. I fell in love. Rug hooking gives me a creative outlet where I need to slow down. I have to pace myself, think about my visual goals and how I can achieve them. And oh boy, is there much to learn.
I wanna tell you about my biggest learning experience in 2012, which at first sight may seem minor, but  makes a world of difference. check out the two pumpkins, ignore the different frames. Anything click?
Omg - first go (above) I hooked a solid brown stem. Nice enough. Teacher told me it does not work, because I have a dimensional pumpkin, so I pulled out just a few loops, added some checkered brown (below) and 'bam' - there it was, my biggest "yes, I get it!" of the year - such small changes lead to making it right - wow! Can you tell that I am still in awe..?!
(yes, this is one of my UFOs and I will transform the pumpkin soon into a little pillow!)
At times I knit, spin and sew more, but the urge to pull some loops is great and grows with time. The internet feeds to that. When you browse the blogworld, you see so many beautiful creations that inspire, just look at my bloglist on the side!
 The other day I threw all of my three unfinished rugs on the floor so that every time I walked by I got the visual input and was reminded to think about where I wanna take them.
In the end I focused on the large rug with my kids drawings. I dyed up blue woolens for the background. Not sure if the color would work I started working around my first finished motives.
 This morning in our small rug hooking group we discussed it, because I just wasn't sure.
 Turned out my blues were too busy, as a background too distractive from the kids designs.
So we jumped into action and went from piles of woolen blues, some white and a tad bit of green...
 ....... to the dye pots...

...and got this!
 Shades of a more uniform lighter blue!


I ended up "marrying" all my blues and yes, I did pull out what I had previously hooked.
Now I am not-patiently-at-all waiting for my new colors to dry so I can pull the blues!

What are you learning these days?