knitting 101

i was beginning to feel confident with the basic sitch- stocking is it called? and turned the page to lesson 2- using punch cards!!One can do many things in that lesson which help you hide knitting mistakes, how clever.Take the skip pattern. By using a card and pressing the two keys on the carriage i can automatically drop stitches! Just to think that i was doing that on my very own and feeling klutzy about it, well, well.

i was having a jolly old time, too good to be true, when the carriage started getting jammed. A jammed carriage is a highly stressful situation. Can't use brute force to move it because you can wreck the whole number.You have to turn the knob to the CR position and it breaks free from the knitting bed. Sort of.

The operation also means unraveling the the pass, controlling all that yarn that you suddenly have in front of you and keeping the card in coordination or the needle selection, thus the pattern, goes wonky. Ask me how i know.
Now i was getting jammed carriage in both directions, whereas at first it was just in one direction.
I was heading into desperation direction when my fairy godmother, working overtime poor soul, appeared with a checklist of suggestions.

Of all it appeared to be bent needles and what the heck, i went for it. How does one change the needles? It has to be a pretty simple operation because i refuse to believe bent needles only happen to me. Looked in the book. NADA!!trouble shooting page, NIET!! kept on turning pages NIENTE!! By the i was sweating, cold sweating i mean, thinking i'd have to send the Gizmo to the nearest repair post which happens to be in the UK.

Went for a walk and a Magners. A sense and sensibility walk.
Cold air clears heads and helps brain cells. Magners numb the senses. The sense of feeling incompetent, that is.
When i came back home i took the instruction book and went page by page. And there it was. Beginning in a corner of page 106 and continuing in 107 the instructions on how to change needles!! People are really slow, man. They start bending needles on page 106 in the how to shape garments lesson.
How accomplished and advanced i was, already bending needles in lesson 2, my, my.

Well i won't go into details of how to change needles because apparently it's common knowledge. It will only suffice to say that when the book says push them down there are various ways of doing so.

Changed needles and i am automatically dropping stitches, no effort.


neki desu

What to do with a digi printed piece of silk organza?

The one that didn't print crisply and has been lying around for years. Getting shuffled from one place to another. From the top drawer to the bottom one because i can't bring myself to throw away a piece of silk organza.

Recycle! turn a UFO into something else, something different because one has made changes in two years.

The silk organza print was a project for a submission to a juried show whose jury never saw. scanned a lace doily and assembled it with a fractal image that i created and then printed it.i Wasn't happy with the outcome so i dropped the project.
Last summer i was testing iron on transfers for an end of the year present to my Japanese classmates and i used the piece to test the transfer on. Figured that being a discard it wasn't going to get ruined. Done and moved on, yet i could not bear to throw the jinxed fabric away.

A couple of weeks ago i found the piece again and since it was a f.up i cut it up and used it ad a base for needlefelting. i liked what was happening to it so i stepped on the gas, ignoring the speed limit and went for a joy ride :)

This was the first one.
And here comes number two

My doubt is whether to tag this as a UFO or a WISP.

neki desu

here TIF 1

i decided to work on the Take it Further Challenge on a weekly basis and blog about the progress.This will give me time to think and develop the concept or colourway and still have time left for my other endeavors. At least it is my intention as of Jan 3rd.

For the first Tif i opted for the colourway because it has some greens and i've always have found it a difficult color to work with. The other part of the inspiration comes from Gunnel as she remarked on a comment to this post that the tulips looked like spring. Nice thought, the promise of spring days to come.

Double clicked on the colourway image and opened it in Photoshop. Then created layers
by selecting and copying parts of the image and assigning a color to each layer by using the flood fill tool. i also used textured background and added a very transparent color wash to it.

Next step was eliminating unwanted information, in other words flattening the colors and eliminating color areas.
And some portions of the photo were literally wiped out :) for the sake of composition and simplification.The textured background was also eliminated as this piece will be worked in a yet undecided textile form. But this will be next week's post.

i am still pondering whether the extra colors left, albeit being the same hue, but different values is some form of cheating. In other words should i just constrain the exercise to the proposed colouurway without further color additions?
What do you think? Opinions. please.

Oh and you can see the full sized photos here

neki desu