yesterday i spent the day cleaning, organizing, and unpacking craft supplies. it’s been over a year and a half since all this stuff’s been out of boxes and storage bins. there’s no inspiration like color coordination!

now all i need is a REALLY comfy couch. or maybe a lovesac

meet my new child, a canon rebel t1i dslr. she looks so very happy climbing up my lamp with her gorillapod legs…

expect some better photos to come. not that i’m a pro or anything, but at least now i have more motivation and no excuses.

i’m planning a 3 day vacation to new hampshire for later this month so we’ll see what this crazy tripod can really do– have i mentioned how ridiculously awesome it is? i dont think i’d recommend using this configuration to photograph outside, but the fact it can even stay up like this is beyond me. don’t you just want to hug it?? no, just me? ok.

i haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but here’s a couple of knitting shots i have managed to get so far:

swallowtail shawl

minimalist cardigan

lyttelton shrug
(this would have been a beautiful shot if i wasn’t wearing the thing inside out)

i’m in the process of setting up a photo (/dye) studio in my apartment and i’m really excited to get some practice using her (she needs a name … hmm). i’ll be back soon with more. stay tuned!

ps. i woke up this morning with the mini wheats jingle stuck in my head. i never could decide if this song was infuriating or the best thing ever. regardless, i had two bowls of maple and brown sugar mini wheats for breakfast.

wow, it’s been a looong time since i wrote a FO post.

Pattern: Norwegian Totoro Mittens by brella

Yarn: Sublime Organic Merino Wool DK in colors 112 and 118 (2 skeins of each)

Needles: US Size 2, 3

Started: May 25, 2009

Finished: July 31, 2009

this project took far longer than it should have. i cast it on with the intention of making it something to work on in japanese class, but my professor was unprecedentedly offended by the idea that someone could 1. listen and knit stockinette at the same time or 2. already have taken 5 years of japanese and just take intro for the credits. anyways, i put these on the back burner and they ended up taking about 2 months.

the pattern was a pretty easy knit– it would be a great first fair isle project, since it’s small but the results look pretty impressive. there are no weird techniques or confusing parts of the pattern. it’s all charted and self-explanatory. the only thing i changed majorly was translating the cuffs into the japanese “tonari no totoro” (the name of the movie in japanese)

i did make the choice to knit them a bit small since i always have problems with gloves fitting my small hands and wrists. i think i overdid it. the widest circumference throughout is 6″ (the pattern as written yields an 8″ circumference). i can manage to squeeze my hands in, but people keep wanting to try them on and i have to explain that i’m not mentally challenged and i actually can knit gloves that fit normal human hands.

also– i LOVED this yarn. it’s so perfect for colorwork because it begins to felt to itself immediately yet it’s soo very soft. in fact, this might be the perfect yarn for a little birds… hmm… back to the drawing board i go.

this semester, i’m taking a book binding class. so the omniscient art school question of “what is art?” is slightly augmented to “what is a book?” in this case, a book is an altoid tin. this is my second project for the class. i’ve bound quite a few books before, but nothing like this. i began with my “creature on my head” hat from last winter. i wrote out a (very quick) pattern, made a woodblock that was patterned to look like the front side stockinette stitch, hand-set a title page on the letterpress, and asked a friend to sketch me a cover. put this all together, and here’s what you get:

front cover:

back cover:

vellum sleeve:

first page:

you get the idea. inside is a bunch of teeny tiny text.

i’m surprisingly pleased with the way this worked out. i wanted it to look the way you’d expect when you open up an altoid tin, so i stitched in that trifold vellum sheet. it also helps because when you pull up the edges it allows the whole book to kind of pop out of the tin so you can fully turn all the pages without bending them. i patterned the vellum by running it through an etching press on the woodblock, and then once it dried i put it through the letterpress with the title. the book was made in InDesign and pamphlet stitched with acrylic yarn and tied in a bow.

i think its cute! i’m thinking maybe if i clean up the pattern a bit (or find some test knitters) i can sell hard copies of the pattern like this instead of generic PDF’s. thoughts?

i just wanted to say thanks to the people over at the Science Channel’s nerdabout blog for mentioning my bearded toque pattern in a recent post about knitted halloween costumes. they found a lot of other cool (and adorable) stuff too, so check it out!

… i suck at it. but i promise i’m going to start making more of an effort. i have a bazillion finished projects and works in progress to post and just need to spend some quality time with my camera.

in the meantime, i’ll do what i should have been doing this whole time when i’m low on blog-ready content.

take a look at my sleeping cat!! (OK, she’s not sleeping in the last one– but how cute is a cat who loves chillin in the tub?)

so just to add to my recent printmaking obsession, i’ve suddenly gotten back into silk screening. this happened to coincide with a recent acquisition of about 200 blank american apparel shirts. convenient, huh? so i decided to challenge myself to do one shirt a day each weekday until i can no longer use the silkscreening studio at school. not sure when that will happen, but for now…..

here are last week’s shirts:

1. this is the first shirt i printed in about 6 years. turns out summer camp silk screening experience didn’t help me much– the design isn’t saturated on most of the shirts (i only did one pass each and it took awhile to realize if i didn’t lift my screen i could do 3 or 4 to get more true colors). either way, i don’t mind them. lysander spooner is appropriate for a shirt with a vintage vibe.

2. gadsden flag. i shot this screen with the intention of making stickers, but ended up throwing in a shirt just for fun. it ended up being one of my favorite shirts, and i’ve enjoyed plastering the stickers and handing them out as well. the background of the stickers is an iridescent yellow– i thought gold would be too tacky and yellow would be too flat so i mixed them

3. based off the ever-popular youtube video, peter schiff was right. he continues to be right to this day, and these shirts have been a pretty decent conversation-starter (conversation, lecture, what’s the difference ?)

4. on that note, i remade some ron paul revolution shirts. the stencilled ones from last year are beginning to look a bit dingy. so even though paul seems to have kind of faded after the election, i’m trying to keep the spirit.

5. finally, i ended the week on a much more intense note, printing-wise. this one started off as a print on paper and eventually evolved into a shirt and then some stickers. it’s oblio and arrow from the point! by harry nilsson. reference photo is from the cover of the DVD. the print is a 9-color edition of 5. and if you know anything about registration, getting that many colors to properly match up on something stretchy like a t-shirt is something only a nutso like me would do. it took the whole day, but hey, i got 4 amazing shirts out of it and i’m really proud (the shirts and stickers are only 7 colors because i left out the background and one of the black layers).

that’s it for this week! thanks for looking, let me know what you think! (with all these extra shirts, i’m always willing to print more for sale. giftable [at] gmail [dot] com for more info!)

quick knitting update– a pair of mittens are almost finished. a sweater is in the works and up to the sleeves. another is about to be frogged entirely. and i’m on the hunt for the perfect yarn for a littleton. lots of pictures and knitterly things to come!

here’s another obscure technique to add to the list: linoleum woodblock printing with a laser etching machine. as it turns out, with a little trial-and-error, technology actually may be a great companion to the ancient practice of printmaking. and while laser etching on to a piece of plexi and using it as an intaglio plate is very much possible, it involves a lot more machinery and expensive materials than the good old wood cut.

if you’ve done woodblock printing before, you know that you begin with a piece of material (wood, or in this case, linoleum) and carve away your design, with the non-carved areas (high points) being what will print. this works well for hand-drawn designs, but for precision, even a steady hand can sometimes cut away too much or make an uneven line. so last semester, i sent out some unmounted easy-cut lino and some very precise computer files to see what kind of detail was possible with the laser machine. i chose to keep with my OK Soda theme, since a big part of the aesthetic of the brand was the clean-cut, industrial text and the layering of multiple images (that is, it had to be exact but would be hard to do with a silkscreen unless i wanted to make a ton of different screens with the appearance of randomness).

so i digitally recreated a bunch of logos (each a few inches wide) and lines of small text (1/2 cm to 1cm in height) from the sides of various cans and sent them off. the laser machine will only etch so deep, and it’s not deep enough. it gets the detail lines really well (see the text on the lino– on some of them, it’s only 5 millimeters tall!), but for large gaps, the roller will dip into the open space and leave you a big mess. below are my final blocks, after being used about a million times (sorry about the grime). you’ll see that i had to go in with hand tools and x-acto knives on all of them to deepen the carvings. that being said, all the exact work was done for me. for contrast, the block of the hand holding a barcode was carved entirely by hand. printing was relatively easy, i just used the stamping method. to make sure every detail printed, i used the back of a wooden spoon to press over the whole stamp before removing it. i tested it on scrap white fabric and then moved on to my t-shirts and then, the symbol of the OK era, the flannel shirt.

text: (seriously. zoom in on this one. 11 megapixels of goodness– the thumbnail doesn’t do it justice)

logo block:

head:

hand with barcode: (hand cut)

why OK Soda? the short story is that it was a fruity soda that Coke released and marketed toward Gen-X’ers (grunge kids) in the early 90’s. their marketing focused on being the indifferent choice and, as you could imagine, they failed miserably at marketing to the unmarketable. the failure of the soda was so epic that the soda never left its test markets and it was soon forgotten. but, nearly 20 years later, fan groups are popping up on the internet and vintage soda cans are selling on ebay. so now, the chronically overmarketed soda which is no longer in existence once again has demand because of its lack of availability. sounds like the paradox of an artist and his art, eh? (that is, that an artists work is never appreciated until he or she is dead).

oh, also i really like the art from the cans. i kind of just wanted merchandise of a brand that never made merchandise (but if it had, nobody would have worn it).

ok, enough typing! here are the final shirts (click to zoom):

inspired by the overlapping logo design here:
(printed on the side of a flannel shirt)

(and on the top and shoulder of a women’s t-shirt)

inspired by the OK-ness of plaid (just following the horizontal and vertical lines):
(on the front pockets of a flannel shirt)

(framing the “OK” logo on the bottom corner of a t-shirt)

(slightly harder to see– hand with barcode on the back of a flannel shirt, framed by plaid patterned text. the hand was taken from this can)

my printing got really sloppy toward the end (especially visible on the 2nd to last one). i was trying to make a deadline on very little sleep and just gave up wearing gloves– my ink-covered fingers were all over the shirts, as were the dirty edges of the blocks. i guess you’ll just have to trust me that printing these is a total dream.

that’s all for now. i promise sometime soon there will be a post about knitting! i’m finally making progress on a bunch of WIP’s and i have a few little FO’s to share. but in the mean time, here are a few of my photos of the 4th of july fireworks this past weekend in NYC. we had an amazing view from the roof. hope you like them

wow, this semester has been so crazy busy. wordpress has implemented an entirely new interface since i last posted, that can’t be a good sign. aside from taking 5 classes, i’ve been busy with two jobs and a hungry hubby.

well, i left my fantastic dream yarn store job in the hopes of finally settling into this new place (it’s been almost a year! oops)… the school year is over (although summer classes aren’t)… and the hubby is still hungry. so now that i have a tiny bit of free time, i want to catch up the past 6 months’ projects and some brainstorming for the future. dunno if i’m still on anyone’s RSS but i sure hope everyone hasn’t forgotten me!

i’ll start with a fun project from mid-semester. i had an assignment for my 3D-printmaking class to somehow integrate a RP (rapid prototyping) machine in a project. if you don’t know what a RP machine is, it’s basically a printer with a big 3D printbed that prints 3D computer files from Maya or similar programs. it prints nearly flat layers of powder until it builds up into your form. the printer uses a light glue solution to get the layers to hold together, and then the forms are extrated sort of like an archeological dig. the final product is a brittle white (or lightly colored, depending on your computer file) powdery object which is usually “infiltrated” (hardened) with superglue or zap-a-gap.

for the class, our final product could be the RP model (it could be a scale model for something, an art piece, or it could be painted or changed in some way) or it could just be somehow related to the model. i remembered some gummi venus de milo replicas and decided i wanted to try my hand at mouldmaking. even better, i wanted to try mouldmaking with gelatin.
disclaimer: if you don’t want to read crazy details, just scroll through the pictures. they’re purrty. the reason for the huge amount of text is that when i was working on it, i could hardly find any information on mouldmaking with gelatin or mouldmaking with an RP model. hopefully this can help someone.

it was a really hard process, especially considering the learning curve with a really complicated computer program and all the issues that the RP machine can have (obviously, every form you complete on a computer screen can’t necessarily exist in real life). this was the first prototype. i printed out a handful of novelty diamond rings with small sprue cylinders at the top, then infiltrated it with plain superglue. the picture is pre-infiltration– you can see how powdery the texture is. i also included the ring i was wearing for size comparison.  i ordered a set of food-grade liquid silicone and a jar of release dit from cuilinart. the first try was a total disaster. i realized that making the whole object and not a half was going to make it really hard to get an exact 2-piece mould. because of the shape, the pieces had to be totally independent so that the ring could pop out at the end. i tried setting the model in modelling clay in a jewelry box but it was awful and lumpy and the mould stuck to the clay. ick.

the second time was a charm– i did all the hard precision work on Maya. i cut the ring down the middle and made it a little box to sit in. i changed it to have two conical sprues instead of the one that definitely turned out too small. and then i flipped the diamond part so, together, i would have one full ring. i infiltrated them, covered them in release dit, and made three moulds using the liquid silicone. the photo shows them infiltrated– you can see how they’re darker and shinier. you can also see the color issues i had– random parts came out white while others printed a gray color. not important for this project, but when you consider the expense of this it really is something they should have worked out. the second picture is the mould with the silicone poured in– perfect precision. i did a shallow coat first with a paintbrush to get the details and then poured the rest.

here are the final moulds. it made it really helpful to have multiples so that the gelatin didn’t cool off while the first ring was setting. i used pieces of balsa wood cut to size and some big rubber bands to hold the two pieces in place. i know i didn’t notch them to fit together but, honestly, that was beyond my 3D programming ability. in the end, i could just tell when they were matched up based off the top and bottom openings.

i didn’t take any photos of the actual process (mostly because i was covered in gelatin) but i used a recipe i found online for gummy bears with a little extra gelatin to make it really stiff (i was afraid the heavy “diamond” on top would sag if it was the consistency of gummy bears). i used only disposable tools that i had bought for the sole purpose of this project. even though it’s all food-based, it really doesn’t come off anything and could really make a big mess if it melted all over your silverware in the dishwasher. in order to get the gelatin into the moulds, i used a ketchup squirter bottle that i found at a hardware store. i put a plastic plate in the fridge and let each ring set in the mould for a few minutes. then i popped them out of the mould and let them set for a bit longer.

here is the final product. there were some rough edges that i had to cut off with an xacto knife. i used two different flavors of jello for coloring and mixed the two together for the third color. i also added powdered lemonade for flavoring, even though the addition of extra unflavored gelatin made the consistency inedible. but they actually did fit! they looked perfect and the diamonds stood up and didn’t sag.

this was how i presented it– each in an individual baggie, inside a vending machine acorn. the glass bowl was supposed to evoke the feeling of the top of a gumball machine, although it was a last minute purchase and i really wasn’t happy with it. turns out they sell plastic half-domes at canal plastics (on canal and mercer)– if only i knew. regardless of the silly pyrex bowl, the presentation went over really well. i gave out the rings and nearly everyone took one. some people even ate them after i warned them otherwise.

whew, that was a long first post back. and kind of dry too. it was just a really technical process and i figured people could probably use parts of it for their own projects. it ended up being a lot of fun and really gratifying.

coming up soon– lots of knit stuff, lots of sewn stuff, and some more printmaking. i promise! happy summer, everyone!

i just got these back from the laser center today. i’m uber excited!

they’re 1/4″ plexiglass, laser cut. and the bottom one is etched, with white opaque ink rubbed in to make the letters stand out. they’re not so functional, but they haven’t broken yet and they do fit. so even if i don’t have full finger mobility, you can bet i’ll be wearin ‘em.

if anyone is interested in a pair (or anything similar) let me know and we can work something out. i love working in this medium.