Blue Bronze
Winter.
I’m spending time learning CAD. I don’t find it so easy but I’m not giving up. I’ve been a hand-knitter for about 35 years so I read knit in hand design and patterns and words. CAD is another world to me. The Blue sample above is a machine knitted sample that the Shima power knit machine at Uni chewed up and released rather begrudgingly after another person’s work was left on the rollers. The waste and cast on had a ladder and the pattern that I had designed from a hand knit idea inspired by Shetland lace, was not suitable in places, for transferring stitches on the Power knit machine.
What came out of the Shima, was something rather beautiful. Something ragged and torn with a raw cast off edge.
I used two double ended 2.5mm needles to pick up the cast off and cast it off safely and then I worked into the ripped part of the sample without plan or forethought.
The hand-knitted section in this machine knitted sample is knitted using very fine metallic and wool yarn in a lace edge pattern which mirrored the diamond that had been ripped away.
The result is raw, it’s rough, it’s unusable but I like it. It is not visually polite. I like the dirty blue colour of the sample and the bronze metallic yarn used to patch it.
What I am interested in is the palimpsest, the traces, the layers and stories:
The traces on the wall of the wallpaper / paint/ borders once layered over each other in a derelict house, exposed to the elements.
The 300 year old graffiti written into the walls of a castle.
The impression of lace on the opposite page in a sample book, after it has been closed for years.
A tear in a shirt.
The darn on an elbow.
The palimpsest of layers of words written in an old book.
I’m looking to express this in darning into the errors, holes, tears, rips in machine knitted lace to make something that both tells a story and can be beautiful.
tracey doxey 