yarn « CrumpArt

March 8, 2010

In a spin.

Filed under: craft,friends,knitting,yarn — Tags: baby, handmade, hat, present, spinning, yarn — Crumpet @ 7:40 am

Yesterday I got news that my friend Alex and his partner, Rebecca, had welcomed a little boy into their family. Now, I knew they were having a baby, knew when it was due, but still somehow had only imagined making a present.

It turns out I can make one of these in half a day. Hooray! It’s the Umbilical Cord Hat from the first Stitch ‘n Bitch book, with 8 extra stitches and as such, an extra lot of decreases to make up for the thinner yarn and smaller needles. Rav details here. I hope it’s still cold enough in China for a tiny new babby to wear a lovely wool hat.

It is getting colder here. And when I was choosing a yarn to knit the hat with, I found two bags of ‘Summer’ wool/silk roving from the Melbourne Handweavers and Spinners Guild in my stash. What better time to start spinning it than just after summer’s end, on the weekend of constant storming when we get hailstones the size of golfballs?

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February 9, 2010

Springtime for Summer.

Filed under: craft,yarn — Tags: handspun, silk, spinning, wool — Crumpet @ 8:38 pm

Sometime last year I paid the Melbourne Spinners and Weavers Guild a visit. I accidentally bought a four shaft table loom while I was there, and also made off with some 40% silk/60% merino roving blends, dyed in the most beautiful colours. I started spinning the one named Spring into singles before we moved. Then, well, we moved, and everything else stopped.

Since setting up my studio here, Spring has Sprung. I have two skeins that I plied with themselves, and one plied with a single of white merino. It’s just. So. Beautiful. I can’t wait to see how Summer spins up.

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September 11, 2009

Star, star teach me how to shine.

Filed under: craft,crochet,yarn — Tags: strokes — Crumpet @ 11:18 pm

I believe this process is called “kicking arse and taking names.”

Another week, another finished project. This is the baby blanket I’ve been plugging away at since January (January 14, to be exact — damn you Ravelry and yr guilt tripping ‘date started’ and ‘date finished’ sections…)

The pattern is the Baby Starghan. The blue wool is Patonyle sock yarn from my stash and was an absolute dream to work with. The green and lavender yarns were left over from old projects. Nicholas is around six months old now, but I’m sure he’ll still get some good use from this, and I thought it especially apt to make it star-shaped as a celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. The next family baby is due in November. The project I have underway is officially called Not a Blanket.

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August 24, 2008

“Little Ewoks. An entire empire brought to its knees by small, furry creatures.”

Filed under: art,craft,geekery,yarn — Tags: art, chaos, crochet, dice, dye, handmade, lorenz, mathematics, science, strange attractor, universe, yarn — Crumpet @ 12:46 pm

Remember these?

Well, the green and white Pi circles have now been frogged and turned into these…

I dyed them using the d20 die set method. As you can see in the following picture, Mr C’s 8-sided die determined the colour, the 20-sided die indicated the length in centimetres of the colour and the 10-sided die determined the overlap of colour.

All of this is part of my latest art project, crocheting the Lorenz Manifold. This stems from my interest in space, the universe and Chaos Theory.

As the Oxford Amercian Dictionary on my laptop puts it, chaos theory is

the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

My lecturer at uni did advise me to go all out with my geek this semester, and as such, I’m lovingly referring to this project in my head as Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets.

This was my Ravelympics project, but I didn’t have the yarn ready in time for the opening ceremony and ended up starting this a week ago instead. There is no way I’ll be getting Ravelympic gold here, but at 23 rounds of a total 47 in, I’m pretty damn proud of my progress anyway. Before this project, the only crochet I knew was the basic stuff needed for knitting, so I’ve learned how to crochet on the coolest (“cool” in geek terms…) project ever.

I’ll give more details as the project goes on, but my proposal this semester is looking at the links between fabric, stories, creation, science and the universe.

As such, this podcast, which I listened to on the tram coming home from work the other night, almost made me cry with its wonderfulness. Thanks to Alex for turning me onto Radiolab.

Happy National Science Week everyone!

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