MADELEINE'S HEP HERD

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.