Unit X: Arm Knitting

The object of this weekend was Scale! Lizzie came over to my flat to get to work on trailing a knit installation. I was very impressed with her knit samples from last week as they were very tactile and even Robin pointed out that throughout the tutorial she simply couldn't stop handling them! What I was interested in was pushing them further in terms of scale and trying to see how we could create 3D shapes out of them.

Because we probably wouldn't be able to source big enough knitting needles for the sort of scale we had in mind, I suggested we try arm knitting after seeing a small sample of it from a friend on the course.  Below is  the Youtube tutorial that we used.

We popped into Abakhans on Saturday morning and since we were just interested in sampling the technique we weren’t particularly fussed about what kind of yarn we used. In the end, we settled for deep purple medium weight yarn and a mossy green yarn that was much finer to give us an idea of the difference in textures. After a bit of fiddling about, we found that the arm knitting process was pretty easy to grasp and were able to make a sample using a whole ball of yarn surprisingly quickly.

Once we had our samples, all we could do next was find some space and start putting it up. We didn't have much of a plan for this as we haphazardly started to stick up random corners of the knit. We found that we liked that shape of the knit when it was pulled taut and twisted to different angles.

Also, as we were knitting I found that my sample was much tighter than Lizzie’s; most likely due to my inability to let go and knit loose ‘messy’ structures! But in the process of hanging up the two pieces we were interested in the contrasting densities between them. In a previous meeting we had talked about the installation being concentrated at a central point and expanding outwards. So the two knit samples worked well in the sense that we could vary the tightness of the stitches in order to portray different densities.

We thought about using different thicknesses of yarns side by side, again as a means of portraying a concentration of energy and outward movement. So the idea is that the yarns used in the centre of the installation could be thick and become progressively finer as we reach the peripheries of the piece.  This is dependent on what we can source as there wasn't a great range available at Abakhan.

Finally, we thought about colour and the possibility of using a gradient colour scheme that uses darker yarns in the centre and lighter yarns as it moves outwards.

Overall, I think this was a successful experiment and we are definitely edging closer to defining our final outcome.