OK. Multilingual index is submitted. Check already received (there are some publishers I love.) Now if I could only make Windows stop switching randomly between keyboard layouts. I usually do search the web in English.
Knitting: massive progress on the seamless Katarina. Nothing like stockinette in aran weight yarn for speed. I have finished the body up to the armholes. I cast on for sleeve #1 last night. I have not yet read far enough to see how I knit an already knit sleeve on to the sweater body for a set-in structure. I was struggling last night with a provisional cast on, and now that I have several rows knit I think the sleeve might be too wide. I will decide tonight if I want to make it narrower at the forearm. It has a provisional cast on because the original pattern then calls for you to pick up live stitches and knit a bell shape onto the bottom. Now that I think about it, I don't want to do that anyway, so perhaps I don't need the provisional cast on: I can just start with a garter cuff.
Weaving/design:
A month til the weaving workshop, so it is beginning to make me anxious. I visited the friend with the garden full of cacti and succulents, and took some of my own pictures. Here is a humungous close-up bit of one of those photos:
I like not only the curves but the light in this one. A simpler bit for a sample -- this is a four-day workshop, might be this little bit:
It becomes almost abstract. I have problems now though with the thorn in the center. But that is good. The problem with working from photographs is falling into a realist representational mode. I would rather this become abstracted in the design process. At the moment though that frond (?), leaf (?. What do you call one of these on a cactus?) looks more like a threatening thorny breast to me. But wait, this is probably the direction I would weave it, not the direction of the final piece. A lot of tapestry is actually woven sideways. That was a term that confused the heck out of me for a long time, until I realized what that meant was that the image was turned sideways. You still weave a piece from the bottom of the loom to the top. But a lot of shapes and lines are easier to weave from the direction you see in the second picture. Though perhaps not in this case.
Here is another try, my favorite this morning.
Though look how the number of curves increase with the focus on that interior line. I love it. A challenge in terms of the lnumber of curves, but again, the workshop can result in a sample, and this could be a longer-term project.
Still, I have to make sure I don't begin to behave as if I am reproducing the photograph. It helps to play with the picture some more with various effects or morphing tools in photo editing software. My plan is to learn to use Photoshop to do this. At the moment I play with Aviary via Flickr, but that is a pretty simple tool. But you can turn a color photo into a black and white, which is great for seeing value rather than color, or sepia-toned. You can blur, invert color (a very interesting way of playing with an image), and in some editors, you can "posterize" an image, which is a sort of uber-simplification of shapes and colors. GIMP is an open source Photoshop sort of program -- again, it has been on my learn-to-use list for quite some time. So far I play with the free ones online. Here are a couple of experiments.
I think this was "posterized." This actually would work well for a tapestry, in that it creates clearly distinguished color/value areas. Here is another: I think this was from Lunapic, or some such online site, their Fire Effect:
As I said, playing like this helps me overcome my kneejerk attempt to make the design like the photo. At the moment, after all this play, I prefer the very first photograph. Again, too much for a workshop piece, so I have worked myself into a complete circle today.
More to come.
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