This Is The Start Of The Piece For The Winner Of The Giveaway. The Road Not Taken, By Robert Frost. I

This is the start of the piece for the winner of the giveaway. The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost. I spent a lot of time figuring out the exact lay out of this one. I ended up writing the pattern out four or five times, but I think I've finally figured out how I want to do it, so here we go. I also think I'm going to make quite a lot of mistakes in this one.  I've made it pretty complicated, but hopefully it will be worth it.)

Incidentally, the winner was allibys. 

So… This is the kind of thing I have mixed and complicated feelings about.

I’m not going to say “that isn’t art” because my position is that art is in the eye of the beholder.

But I *will* say that this is something that hundreds and thousands of knitters and crocheters the world over do ALL THE TIME. It’s called frogging. It’s just efficient. You find something that’s not going to be used or worn, but where the yarn is still reasonably undamaged and you frog it. You store the yarn for a future project.

Like I said, I’m not going to claim this isn’t art, but what I don’t understand is why it gets acknowledged as art when two white men do it in a gallery-space, and not when hundreds and thousands of (mainly) women do it every single day in their own home.

If Lernert and Sander are unaware that this is common practice amongst yarn-based crafters then their research is piss-poor and they should do better. If they did know, and just chose not to acknowledge their indebtedness then they’re just appropriative assholes.

Yes, frogging finished items is a beautiful thing and it’s art, but it was art already when everyone in the yarn-based craft community did it. These two men doing it doesn’t magically make it art when it wasn’t before.

I feel this is the sort of thing that they should have written an ‘academic’ (whatever that means) article about, acknowledging the actual community engaged in this practice and then discussing what makes it such a beautiful phenomenon, rather than just plagiarising a community’s common practice and getting praised for it because ‘omg, men working with a material stupidly designated by society as being for women, HOW AMAZING.’

I also have issues with this relating to necessity/thrift/class/wealth, but I cannot brain well enough to articulate those right now. But there’s definitely something insidious about taking a practice based on reusing and saving money and ‘making do’ and importing it into the corpulent, lucre-obsessed art world. And the act of importing it devalues the concept/practice in the same way private collectors devalue the work when they rip a Banksy piece of a wall and store it in their private galleries.

Small relaxation project from last night. Lots of detached chain stitch, buttonhole variant, a whipped woven wheel (or double whipped, I wrapped around the two strands of the chain stitch spokes separately) and Ceylon stitch in the middle. It was more an experiment in shape and design than stitch techniques. As you may be able to tell, I'm rediscovering my love for geometry.

More geometric play. The symmetry isn't perfect, but given the amount of tension points, I'm happy with it. The stitches used here are all really basic - twisted satin, buttonhole, vandyke, lazy daisy, whipped wheel. The complexity comes from how they interact with and tension each other (e.g the vandyke stitch will loop around the cross junction of two button hole stitches, and pull them into a new positions (and then you have to try and get exactly the same tension another 9 times). I don't know if there's an official name for this type of embroidery. I have a lot of stitch dictionaries and collections, and I've never seen anything like this in any of my books. If no one else knows of a pre-existing name for it, I'mma have to invent one. Maybe... Arachne work.

K, L Q, R K is Dutch knot, L is French knot, Q is sorbello stitch, R is French cross stitch. I really like puzzling out how I'm going to group the different types of stitches within the whole sampler. Sorbello stitch is very similar to Dutch knot (the difference is 45 degrees), and French knot and French cross stitch are also similar. All four are types of knot stitch.

Okay, I'm very curious: what makes you determine how you are doing a translation into stitching?

Essentially: just reading the poem. I read to see if there's an obvious colour palette suggested by the poem. Reds and oranges, for instance, seem a fairly obvious choice for Blake's poem 'The Tiger' - the tiger  'burning bright' and the imagery of the forge, etc. 

Then I do a pretty basic frequency analysis of the text and sort the letters according to frequency, which helps me refine the colour palette - if I want more reds than oranges, then I need to assign reds to the more frequently occurring letters, etc. 

I also might assign colours based on a specific detail I want to pick out - to carry on with the Blake example, I might want to draw attention to how many questions there are in the poem, so I'd assign a really stand-out colour to the question marks. 

I'm currently working on a translation of Wordsworth's 'I wandered Lonely as a Cloud' I picked a blue colour palette because so much of the imagery refers to the cloudy sky, the night sky, the reflection of the daffodils in the lake, etc. but I'm picking all the punctuation out in yellows to represent the daffodils and to try and catch on some level the images evoked in the poem.