Me, On The Radio. Fun Times!

Me, on the radio. Fun times!

Stitched Iliad Interview

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I was in BBC Broadcasting house Bristol this morning, doing a short interview on the Iliad project for BBC Radio Bristol. I’m in the last ten minutes or so if anyone would like to listen. 

Just to let everyone know, the giveaway is now over, and the winner has been contacted. As promised, I wrote everyone's names on bits of paper, stuck them in a hat and got a curious cat to stick his paw in an pull one out. Your hat for this giveaway was Pink Floyd and the cat was Zeno. I wish I'd filmed it, but I needed both hands to hold the hat open for him.

I looked up from my work for a couple of seconds to watch the kittens play, and when I looked back down this little punk was crawling over it.

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.

20 bunnies finished up over the last 2 days by another artist and myself (the original squares from which the bunnies were made were knitted/crocheted by a larger group of crafters). This is a small part of a far, far larger project that's in the works.

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.