Hello from the work station! I want to apologize right off the bat for a longer than intended absence from the blog. Since I last updated, I completed my first full week of classes/seminars/studio and caught a nasty little cold bug (don’t worry, no pig flu around these parts!). So basically I’ve spent the last 11 days either sleeping or nose-deep in Kleenex. Thankfully it’s finally petered off and I can get back down to business!
So, I may have mentioned it before but I am presenting getting ready to embark on a huge project for an upcoming exhibition in Ontario. It’s a group exhibition of artists working in textile-based practices, specifically those people who work “around the frayed edges of fibre art”. As much as the term “fibre art” kind of irks me, the call for submissions sounded really exciting. And, shoot! If there’s anyone who works on the edge of fibre art, that’s me!
I submitted a proposal for a multi-headed sweater that will fit nine people. I’ve had the idea for a long time now and I’m really excited that I’ll be able to execute it and have it exhibited. I’ve spent the last few months thinking about the logistics of knitting a nine-person sweater and after many half-finished models and drawings, I finally decided to screw the entire “planning” idea and jump right in! And to be quite honest I am a doer rather than a planner anyway so this works out.
So I began the task of deciding on yarn. This is going to be a really large garment–I’ve estimated it to be about 2 metres square, give or take a foot–so the gauge and yardage is pretty important, not only for scale but for the time constraints I have. I decided that in an ideal world I would use White Buffalo Wool, a 5 or 6-ply unspun bulky yarn that’s used for knitting Cowichan sweaters. However, in the real world they stopped making that yarn decades ago so my chances of finding it in large quantities and at a decent price are pretty much slim to none. Just as I was feeling defeated by my ultra-specific tastes where wool is concerned, I realized that White Buffalo Wool is basically pencil roving (duh!) and suddenly my search results opened up.
Unfortunately, none of those results showed me anything in the Montreal area. I really wanted to get away from dealing with shipping costs and couriers and all that nonsense but the more I searched and asked around, the more I realized I had no choice in the matter. Thankfully I stumbled upon Wool-Tyme, a yarn distributor based in Ottawa. It’s the only place I’ve found remotely close to Montreal that sells Briggs and Little, and it’s one of the few places I’ve found in Canada that have the full range of Country Roving colours! I put in my order almost immediately after finding the website and after some quick correspondence with Victoria of customer service, I received my 10 lbs of bulky wool yarn basically overnight.
I decided on a light sheep’s grey for the main colour of the sweater with alternating patterns of white, red, black and navy. I’m pretty sure I’m going to run out of yarn but considering how quick it took to ship from Ottawa to Montreal, I’m not worried about getting more.
Knitting with this stuff is a little tricky, especially since my preferred gauge is usually between 5 and 7 stitches to the inch. I’m using the largest tips of my KnitPicks interchangeables and trying very hard not to accidentally rip the wool as I knit with it. I’m not really sure what I’m doing in regards to the decorative pattern around the yokes, choosing this first one to figure out all the kinks. I’m keeping notes, funny little detailed things that probably will make no sense to anyone but me. I’ve been looking at Icelandic and Cowichan sweaters, as well as scouring some EZ staples (Knitting Around, etc). I have the construction roughly figured out in my head, knowing that a lot of the problem solving will come once I actually encounter the problem.
I have nine necks and yokes to knit and then graft together. Then come the front, back and sides of the sweater (think of the whole thing being knit like a cube). Lastly, it’s the sleeves and then I’m done! I’m hoping to knit roughly one neck every week, allowing a few days grace here and there depending on the health of my hands and my mental stamina. Once all the knitting is done, then comes the really confusing part–developing a metal armature to support the thing as an object suspended in space. Thankfully, there are technicians around Concordia who can help with that sort of thing.
