So I had this blue jumper hanging around that I very rarely wore for a number of reasons:
1. It had a V-neck that had little depth and did not suit me.
2. I tried a new method of working the ends of balls of yarn into the knitting that I read about on the web and it was a complete disaster.
3. It was in reversed stocking stitch and when looked at from the back it would appear that I knit purl rows at a slightly different tension to the knit row – which is not visible on the right side of stocking stitch.
4. The way I had joined the pieces together just wasn’t working for me on the purl areas.
5. It was too warm to wear most of the time.

As you can tell from the list the jumper wasn’t a big hit in my eyes. This is what I started to do last night:

I did like the cabled hem to the jumper – that was why I chose the pattern. I like knitting cables. I like the colour too. And it is wool yarn. So I’ve decided to knit it up as a cardigan. I hope I’ll get more use out of it that way. I spent a long time searching the web for a pattern I liked without much success. So I decided to join up to Ravelry to see if I would have more success there. And this is what I found – a lace cardigan by Chic Knits called Cerisara. What really made up my mind was this yellow version knitted by Craftivore – doesn’t that look great?

Hope mine is also a success. If not I guess it will be unravelled and reknitted at some point. It wouldn’t be the first time I knit yarn up 3 times before I like the finished product. (To be honest I’m finding the sleeves on this purple one less to my liking over time. They are too wide at the bottom edge. Might be another reknit in the offing!)

The sketchbook turned into more of a journal. The topic I chose lent itself to the direction I ended up taking. The amount of sketching dwindled towards the end. One of the things I learnt from this exercise is that I am more comfortable collaging then actually applying pencil or paintbrush to paper.

I tried out the image transfer technique that was described in Tip jar Thursdays! No. 11 on the Art House Co-op blog. I used it first to create the map of our trip from Xàtiva to Murcia. It was quite successful there – although the acetone appears to have made its way right through to the back cover and messed up the label there. When I tried it again on the cover I got some very smudgy results that I wasn’t at all happy about. So the final cover turned into a cover up job.

Now all I have to do is put it in an envelope and into the post.

I’m missing not having a Christmas tree this year, so I made myself a little Ersatz Christmas tree too.

There was a Christmas market here today too. So I ventured out into the cold to see what it had on offer. As disappointing as the one last weekend in the main part of Kronberg. This year there seems to be almost exclusively food and drink on offer. I was supposed to be going into Frankfurt to the main Christmas market on Friday with colleagues from work, but that got cancelled due to the storm warnings and people wanting to get home in one piece. So I’m still not really in a Christmassy mood yet.

The thought of all those letters travelling across the world made me want to include them somehow in my sketchbook. Some greetings and good wishes are travelling to me and some are leaving me to make the recipients feel just as good as I do, I hope, when I find new post in my letter box each day. I didn’t want to use the cards themselves as they are on display and adding some festive cheer to my flat here in Kronberg. So I decided to use some of the envelopes instead. Everything you see on these pages came from an envelope – yes even the Christmas tree.

View outside

Zimtsterne

P.S. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image

Basically there were 3 levels for the judging – excellent, satisfactory and needs improvement. Not much grey scale in there, but I suppose it makes for more standardised judging. I didn’t get any “needs improvement” so that was a relief, but didn’t help me much with my search for areas to improve on. One judge gave me half and half excellent and satisfactory, the other about 2/3 excellent to 1/3 satisfactory. Where they both agreed, was that my technical skills were excellent, e.g. piecing, quilting technique, etc. The latter pleasing me no end as I personally feel there is certainly room for improvement there. Both gave me an excellent for “original in design” – another big boost to my confidence – and in fact one of them noted that one of the best features of the quilt was that it was very original.

So what are the areas that need improvement? Well both agreed that the “visual impact” and the “integration of all design elements” were only satisfactory. So obviously I need to do something about both of those. I wish I could find more photos of the quilts in the exhibition, especially of the winners. I would like to be able to compare mine to the others to see where the differences lie. I suppose I shall have to revisit the principles of design again and try to analyse what worked and what didn’t work in my quilt and repeat the exercise for other quilts that have been singled out by others as being top notch. This is where it would be useful to know which quilts were the winners. It’s one thing to know what was not up to scratch, but it’s quite a different thing to work out what needs to improve.

When my grandma lived with us after my granddad died, she used to knit handbags and covers for coat hangers that were sold to provide funds for some good cause, although I no longer remember which exactly. I know it gave her a sense of purpose and a good use for her time. My mother was an excellent knitter and knitted many beautiful jumpers and cardigans for my sister and I. Later she knitted school cardigans for her granddaughters too. Hand-knitted garments are so much nicer that shop bought ones. I do knit myself, but I’m the first to admit that I don’t have the same skill as my Mum. My sister is a better knitter than I. When she was at school, she used to knit for her friends to boost her pocket money. Sadly she no longer has time for hand crafts.

The knitting grannies have their own web site called Kaffeslabberas. It is in Danish, but if you use the Chrome browser to view it you can set the browser to automatically translate it, which is a pretty neat feature. They have also brought out a book of specially commissioned knitting projects. Unfortunately it only appears to be in Danish.

Wouldn’t it be great if this idea caught on it other countries?

The collage is inspired by some of Paul Klee‘s paintings based on a grid of coloured squares. I am drawn to those paintings and those of Ton Schulten as inspiration for quilts. Of course this collage is not about the colours but about the shapes.

The photo was taken with flash as the days as so short now that the daylight was gone before I was finished. But you get the general impression.

The special exhibits seem to be a bit of a poor relation at the IFQ. Apart from the galleries on the website they receive minimal publicity. At least I’ve found next to nothing by googling. The most information I found was on this blog at chron.com, which appears to be the online presence of the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

So here finally I present Use Your Eyes, my last quilt made before packing up the studio for its move to Spain.


The quilt explores the idea of words as a design element. My inspiration came from reading about Notan, the Japanese concept involving the play and placement of light and dark next to the other. By exploring the balance of the positive and negative shapes in words and reducing the contrast in the shading so that the viewer is uncertain which shape is the positive and which the negative, the text presents a visual challenge. The intention is that at first glance the words should not be instantly recognizable. The challenge to myself as the designer was to use the complementary colors of red and green, but to achieve a balance in the values in each word to support the uncertainty regarding the positive and negative spaces. I chose a favorite quotation by the Australian artist Ken Done for my text and arranged the words as a word cloud giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. The title of the quilt Use Your Eyes is taken from the quote and is meant as an invitation to the viewer to stop and study the quilt and discover the text in the design.

As for my new studio: I was in Spain for 10 days getting back last Wednesday. We were supposed to take possession of the house on the Tuesday, but things didn’t go according to plan. There is still work going on inside the house – bathrooms not finished, painting still to be done etc. We camped in it, in a fairly primitive manner, from the Saturday and poor Sqeze is camping there still. The kitchen was handed over to him on Friday, so at least he will be able to eat more than bread and cheese soon. It will be a while yet before the studio can be commissioned.