MADELEINE'S HEP HERD

 Performance knitting was added to my CV at the end of last month! I answered a call to join the International Knitting Circle associated with the experimental rock band ' faUSt '. I've enjoyed their music for about 40 years and they were playing just round the corner from my house so of course it seemed like the obvious thing to do. When I arrived at the gig it turned out that Edinburgh had mustered a circle of one knitter - me! Just as well since the stage was very full of gear.  I sat at the front of the stage for the full set, knitting a hat and being a focus of calm for the audience if the rest of the show was overwhelming!  Here's a photo from the gig, taken by Mike Calder. As you can see, faUSt don't just use conventional musical instruments!  It was huge fun and I'd be up for doing it again if the opportunity arises.  Hidden Gems is the jewellery exhibition at Coburg House this month.  I'm taking part with a new collection of felt...

Kaleidoscope photos of snowflake knitting as Christmas cards Christmas shopping season is upon us again but I'm taking the Christmas selling easy. This year has been particularly busy with family events, Botanica Mathematica exhibits and a conference talk so I haven't lined up any art or craft fair stalls. If you want my work you'll have to come to Coburg House , 15 Coburg Street, Leith, Edinburgh on a weekend in December. Open Studios is 2 and 3 December 11am-5pm with and opening night on 1 December 6pm-9pm. I'll have the full range of my work on show in the studio and if there's space I'll demonstrate the hacked knitting machine. Almost all of the artists at Coburg House will open theirs doors to the public. There'll be an exhibition and the shop on the ground floor as well as a couple of pop-up cafes.  Set aside a good few hours to see all four floors of studios. Hidden Gems is jewellery exhibition in the Coburg House Gallery for the remaining...

Not a bricks and mortar shop but an online presence for people who can't get to events and exhibitions. I've stocked it with two kinds of needle-felted brooches to get started - Bauhaus-inspired geometric collection and a range using upcycled Fair Isle knitting. Click through any of the images below to visit the shop. I'll be adding more stock over the summer - action painting silk scarves, knitted pictorial wall hangings, shawls, wraps and more textile jewellery, basically anything I make that  you don't need to try on to see if it fits!  Hope you like what you see.

Knitted wall hanging of D'Arcy Thompson Exciting news! The Botanica Mathematica project is heading to Dundee for the whole of June as part of the centenary celebrations of D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form . The newly classified collection of Binary Bonsai be on display in the most appropriate setting imaginable. Thompson wrote On Growth and Form in 1917, inspiring the field of mathematical biology and a host of artists later in the 20th century.  His collection of zoological specimens in housed in the University of Dundee along side a permanent collection of related artwork. Julia Collins and I started working on Botanica Mathematica in 2013 with Thompson's ideas in mind.  We wanted to explore simple, mathematical rules that would generate botanical forms using textile craft processes. We came up with a few ideas, some based on the way early computer graphics simulated plant growth. Binary Bonsai, L-system Fibonacci Flowers, Hyperbolic Kelp and Chanterell...

a snap of some Waterfall Scarves in my studio at a Coburg House. [ update : One scarf sold this season so I decided to pay it forward and made a donation of £95 instead of £9.50.  The scarves will go on sale again later in the year and if I sell more than ten I'll donate again.] Yes it's that time again! The time when we arts and crafts folk hope you'll give creative handmade things to your nearest and dearest. I'll be giving back too -  fifteen percent of the sales of my Waterfall Scarves at Open Studios or the Arts Market will be donated to Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) who do life-saving voluntary work providing healthcare in conflict zones, at natural disasters and fighting epidemics around the world. Hand-dyed yarns make these scarves are unique.  There are lots more colours in the collection than you see in this photo. They come in two sizes - long and narrow or shorter and wider. The fibre content is varied too - some are  traditi...

Ready for knitting in 2017 Happy new year from Knot Unknot. I'm not one for seasonal resolutions but I've heard that setting targets is helpful. I think it's more giving hostages to fortune but I shouldn't knock it until I've tried it. To that end, I'm listing a bunch of studio-related stuff I want to get done soon. There's a lot more on the personal to-do list but, well, it's personal! Exhibitions for Botanica Mathematica Last autumn Jo and I sorted out all 75 trees in the Botanica Mathematica specimen collection and created taxonomy with species names.  This means the project is finally ready to exhibit so I'm making enquiries with likely hosts this month.  The main things I need for this are time and old-fashioned display cases. Learn to use new equipment Towards the end of last year I bought some second-hand kit (a ribber for the hacked knitting machine and a linker) and a new overlocker sewing machine.  They all need a bit of setting up...

A quick blog post to let you know that I have a spot at Event Horizon 12. It's Edinburgh's monthly science fiction night and there's music and readings too. The theme of the evening is Star Trek is 50 and I guess I've been a fan for almost as long so expect some trek knits in the slide show at least.  Mostly I'll be talking about  my current projects, Botanica Mathematica and hacked knitting machines. You find  Event  Horizon in the Blind Poet pub on West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh,  starting at 19.30 approximately, on Monday 3 October. Come in and geek out -or you'll forever be a Herbert!

Lots of stuff happening  at Knot Unknot these days so here's list. New work being created for summer events includes tuck stitch scarves in silk blend yarns, hand dyed silk scarves, needle felted Harris Tweed brooches  (picture below) and felted crater vessels. Main summer events at Coburg House are our art and craft market 10-12 June and Open Studios 5-7 August. To get ready for Open Studios, I also need to have a big clear out so there will be surplus yarn for sale as well as my work. Last call for contributions to Botanica Mathematica went out recently. At the end of summer we will be classifying the  trees and creating a taxonomy so get those knitting needles clicking.

It's April and Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire is almost upon us and I don't really know where the time has gone since my last post in December! Most of my creative time has been spent learning just what the hacked knitting machine I posted about last time can and can't do. We had a great weekend break in London during February, visiting inspiring exhibitions meeting friends and going to shows.  The Cosmonauts exhibition in the Science Museum certainly gave me a lot of immediate inspiration for the machine and is likely to do so for some time to come. I was very taken with the story of Belka and Strelka , (the dogs who came back alive - along with a rabbit, 42 mice and 2 rats!).  They went on to be Soviet celebrities with children's books and animated TV series being created as well as a huge souvenir industry. So I'm adding to the souvenirs... That's just a test piece - the yarn turned out to be unsuitable but the colours are good. Some of my other test pie...

In the last days of 2015 I finally made a token part of what was supposed to  be this year's grand project. Honour is somewhat asuaged if not completely satisfied. The United Nations declared 2015 to be the International Year of Light for many reasons including the anniversary of James Clerk Maxwell unifying electricity and  magnetism in his famous equations. Having worked in his birthplace at 14 India Street Edinburgh among all sorts of memorabilia, I have long harboured ideas of celebrating his work in textile form. 2015 was  the obvious time to do it but life happened instead. In October 2014 I attended fashion technology conference in Berlin. Inspired by things I learned there I was going to hack an old electronic knitting machine in order to knit red, blue and green portraits of Maxwell in the style of his invention of colour photography. I also envisaged a Victorian gentleman's jacket embellished with braided emboidery symbolic of intertwined light waves. My ...

At the beginning of October, Felt United Day and Fun Palaces coincided so with the help of Craft Reactor I celebrated them both.  We had a free felt making workshop that attracted 17 people completely new to making felt.  By the end of the day there were 21 felt flags based on the Felt United 2015 theme of "home". The flags were stitched together overnight by Carmen from Craft Reactor and decorated the following day's Fun Palace events. That's them at the top of this post strung along the balustrade at Old College Quad, University of Edinburgh in a photo by Heather Rea who made the tenth flag from the left. There was a lot going on in the Quad to celebrate the arrival of the Mini Kelpies sculpture - chocolate science experiments, circus skills workshops, geometric sculpture building and more. I'll put a full post with lots more pictures on the Craft Reactor site in the very near future. For about a week around the workshops I felt totally burnt out but it ...

Today is Ada Lovelace Day so in the spirit of the day I'm sharing some inspirational history. In spite of the fact that neither of us now work as scientists I'd like to dedicate this Ada Lovelace Day blog post to Dr Yvonne Beale and the exhibition that wouldn't have existed without her. Back in 2002, Yvonne and I were members of Edinburgh Women's Science Forum (EWSF).  I had been a member and an office bearer for over ten years and met Yvonne a couple of years earlier at Orkney Science Festival.  She came to Edinburgh to study for a PhD in genetics and got involved in EWSF activities. Although there is still a need for groups like EWSF, this particular organisation seemed to have reached the end of its natural life span but Yvonne inspired me and the rest of the group to create a small legacy before closed down fully. We proposed to spend our remaining funds on a flexible exhibition that could easily travel to different locations for a few years after we wound up. ...

So here at last is what we made at Mini Maker Faire in April with the Knitting Wheel of Fortune! Four pure wool scarves, all textured and twisted according to visitors' wheel spins. Many  thanks to Carmen Moran for designing the graphics for the wheel and helping make  Knot Unknot look so fabby on the day.  We also had a small reprise of Attack of the Knitted Tentacle which Carmen and I created in 2010 - enormous fun! Life has run away with a lot of my time recently and this blog has had a bit of a gap  in postings. There have been two main things to report: a move to a larger studio in May and a group exhibition in June. The new space is great and once it's organised it should make a big difference to what I can make and to what you can see at Open Studios  (next one 8 &9 August ). The exhibition looked lovely but after the opening weekend virtually no one came to see it. Ah well, we live and learn. I'll post some photos next time I'm off to the stud...

The Knitting Wheel of Fortune is finally taking shape! I'm really looking forward to launching it at Edinburgh's Mini Maker Faire on 19 April. This weekend I acquired some gaming dice and started trying out different stitches. This activity has to be something complex enough to be interesting but reliable and quick enough to be "performance knitting" - not just in public but with a participating audience - and it has to produce something that doesn't look like a waste of yarn. So, a bit of tinkering with the initial conditions is required. I'll be using the Knitmaster Zippy 90.  It's light enough to transport easily and compact when it's set up too. It works with chunky yarns so things will grow quite quickly. There's no punchcard and manual colour changing is very slow so each piece will be one single yarn.  I didn't want to just randomly generate stripes - there are websites that can do that for you, like this very nice one on Biscu...

Following on from my last post about dice decision knitting, I'm now looking at making holes instead of stripes to create a lacey effect. This involves many more decisions than the stripes you have to decide how far apart the holes are, vertically and horizontally. You also have to decide how often to repeat that pattern  before changing to another.  You could also use the dice to set the starting parameters and to decide when to stop. It depends whether you want a wearable piece or a high concept art piece. For the piece in the photos, I set the parameters for a scarf in aran weight yarn and decide to stop after 400 rows or whichever dice decided section brought me close to it. I used different shapes of dice to decide each aspect of the placing of holes. This gave me some control over the process, setting different ranges of outcomes in each case. A purist might  have used the dice to decide which dice to assign to which decision but you run the  risk of devel...

A long long time ago I read Luke Reinhart's The Diceman. It seemed edgy, dodgy  and intriguing to think of living a life controlled by the throw of dice. Not something to apply to real life though - until now! You see, the thing is that you set the parameters before you throw the dice. So you decide on the questions and the set of answers. You can apply the principal locally and have "rigidly defined areas of uncertainty" (to quote Douglas Adams). For example: I have grey yarn and red yarn. What shall I knit? I have a dodecahedral di to help decide. even numbers = scarf,  odds = hat Throw again Evens=holes, odds=stripes I got even,  then odd, so threw to decide the first colour and then the size of each stripe. The scarf finished when on of the yarns ran out. The final outcome is pictured below. Next time we'll see what happened when throw two was even.

The Shine Dome in Canberra put my knitted neuraminidase on display on 23 January 2015. I'm so pleased that this amazing project has come together so well.  Thank you to Crystals in the City (especially Helen) for inviting me to take part and to Yuri for designing such a great plinth for my work.  And, of course, thank you to the Society of Crystallographers of Australia and New Zealand and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for funding the project. It was hard work but enormous  fun and I am delighted to be part of this collection of sculpture celebrating the International Year of Crystallography 2014. 2015 has been designated International Year of Light and I have some fun ideas for marking that with art and craft - just waiting for the funding. If you can help with that then please get in touch.

Earlier this year the Scientific Director at my day job moved on to a new post.  As well as a big collective leaving present, some of us thought we'd like to give him more personal souvenirs of his time at ICMS.  One of my colleagues suggested I knit him a new hat to wear while standing outside on his cigarette breaks. So this is what I came up with. As a hat for a mathematician, of course there are mathematical features - simple ones that could be made quickly and which don't detract from a classic shape. There are powers of two in the rib, the Fibonacci sequence in the sides and then a seven-sided (heptagonal) crown.   It's knitted in the round  with one skein of Rowan's Lima, an amazingly soft, baby alpaca yarn that's approximately aran weight.  I picked this colour because it's similar to the ICMS logo colours but it's much richer, with a lot of detail in the drifting shades. Different yarns will work but beware of tension etc.  I don't have...

Happy to say that the knitted neuraminidase is now in Australia,. The Crystals in the City team should have it assembled and on show soon. At the end of the last post I was just about to start stuffing the polystyrene balls into the tubes.  That was a much tougher job than I expected.  The balls fitted neatly in the tubes and so each one of the 1200 of the needed pushed into position individually.  Each  module was a day's work. Then they needed twisted and stitched so all colours were the same shape and interlocked.  Photos above show that. It all got done and packed at the beginning of the month an shipped the day before I left for a conference in Berlin (subject of a future post). Just over a week later I  got word the parcels had all arrived intact.   I'm really looking forward to seeing it installed in its home in Canberra.

It's ages since I posted something. It's been a  busy summer with, Open Studios, Festival Exhibitions and assorted other things.  The project that's keeping me busy just now is a great big heap of fun though - and I thought my readers ought to know the story so far. Sometime back in the summer I spotted a tweet from a science communicator looking for an Australian fibre artist to create a crystallography-inspired sculpture. I retweeted to spread the word and replied that it was a shame the project wasn't in Scotland or I'd have been very keen.  Never thought any more about it Then I was contacted again by Helen Maynard-Casely, one of the organisers of  the Australian celebration of  2014 International Year of Crystallography . Turned out they couldn't find a local artist  but the did find extra funding for shipping so if I was serious about doing it the job was mine. Wow!   Such a good opportunity but such a difficult time to fit in the work. I a...