Knitting projects

After finding these amazing knitting blogs

http://outdoorknit.blogspot.com/

http: //artyarn.blogspot.com/

Its got me thinking about my own on going knitting project of making a tent/room out of knitting, I have started to think about turning this into a different more public piece. At the moment I have two large strips of knitting which make up two sides of the room, these could actually be stitched together to make one long strip which would be about 6 meters long, which would make an amazing banner.

American Craft Magazine 0ct/ Nov 09

Whilst looking through American craft I cam across these beauts:

Lisa Anne Auerbach uses machine knitted piece/ garments to voice her political views as a form of protest.

I also came across this other political piece by Marianne Jorgensen against the Iraq war. She created a hand knitted "tank" cosy.

Group Tutorial

After the last group tutorial not going exactly to plan should I say, this weeks went a hell of a lot better. I was so pleased to see people enthusiastic about my work, especially as I was worried it wasn't quite up to scratch,it's always great to find that people enjoy your work. I find personally the group tutorials more helpful than the one on ones, they generate more ideas and creativity in the group. Even though I do find that when it comes to my turn to show my work I don't get as much back from the group as others do. I don't know if this is purely because I'm sorted and on the right track or if people just don't get my work?!

John Baldessari : Pure Beauty

Whilst in London last weekend I visited the Tate and came across this beautiful exhibition that I didn't even realise was on, I was actually heading to see the Pop life exhibition but went to this instead, so glad. The artist John Baldessari, I had never heard of before. It was mainly a collection of his older pieces such as his text paintings, which once I saw, I did recognise other work included photography pieces. I only wish I had all day to spend viewing it and that I'd bought the book. I intend to go back.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/johnbaldessari/default.shtm

Food and Embroidery

I just came across this on www.feelingstitchy.com and its made me think about a different way to use food in my project instead of just trying to knit with it.

Knitting with Food

I have spent the past several hours trying to master the "art" of knitting with spaghetti, filming my attempts. On the fifteenth take I finally managed to cast on three stitches and actually knit with two of them before the spaghetti broke, that was as good as it got.

I'm going to leave the spaghetti over night and see if this improves the strength and try again.

I also think its a good idea to stop before it drives me mad.

Food Project

To start with I chose to research into the social aspects of food, mainly dinner parties and how these have varied over the years. I came across an artist Judy Chicago who produced a large scale instillation of a dinner table. Its a feminist piece celebrating important women throughout history. Each place setting is individually designed for the person it is made for, hand embroidery on the napkin and on the runner. I loved this piece not only for the beautiful embroidery but for the amount of thought and detail that went into it. There are thirty nine place settings on the triangular table and 999 women's names carved into the tiled floor.

From this piece I was inspired to look at other feminist art and think about ways of using it in my work and linking this with the food brief, thinking about gender associations, stereotypes and roles. This then lead on to knitting and how its mainly done by women and is seen by some as traditional domestic work. Combining this with food is the next step.