MADELEINE'S HEP HERD

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 ...