the start-again hat

I promised to post about knitting, and here it is: A new hat. In lack of a better name, I call it the start-again hat, because casting-on is the main design element of this hat.

Kunstformen der Natur

From the top: ernst haeckl,chris hipkiss , kiki smith , sam messenger , ernst haeckl.


Kunstformen der natur refers to Ernst Haeckl, German scientist (1834 - 1919), and his fantastic illustrations of animals and sea creatures.

(next post will be on knitting, promise..)

other people's art

In my iPhoto I have stored a considerable amount of photos of other people's art. It can be anything I come across, that tickles my interest, some are pieces made of famous artists, some quite unknown (at least to me). They all have someting that I find interesting and inspiring. I thought maybe I should start sharing them with you. I will try to remember to give up the sources from where I found them, but - I don't always remember.

These are drawings by a woman called Pearl Blauvelt (found via Mieke Willems blog), who lived in New York and who left behind 800 drawings, found after her death. She was self-taught, unskilled artist, she drew things she saw in magazines, in shops and in her immediate surroundings. When the building she had lived in was to be renovated, her drawings were found in an old wooden box. Some of them are now part of MOMAs collection in New York. Quite fascinating. See Raw vision for more.

the girl

She is a year and a half now, my little girl. She is as adorable and beautiful as she looks. But her birth almost took me away from this world. I thought I had recovered from it, or that I would shortly, but now I'm not so sure. We did the drawing together. I scribbled along, without really thinking of what I was drawing. And then came these faces and this little girl. As a girl, I used to draw a lot. And what I mostly drew was; girls. I liked this one on the right, she looks a little apprehensive and timid, but curious too - waiting for what will come next. So I copied her and put her in my blog. She represents something of what I feel myself these days.

Japan, Japan

Clockwise: Ryoko Aoki, Zon Ito, Yuka Katagiri. All young Japanese artists, except for Zon Ito, they all do drawings. It may look like a drawing, but on closer inspection you see that it's embroidery. I like this whimsical, naîve style of drawing/ embroidery.
(click to see larger image)

Above a print by contemporary German artist Eva Pietzcker , and the famous Tsunami wave by the 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. Both use Japanese woodblock print, a waterbased print method. 

In beginning of March, I will attend a one week work-shop to learn this printing method. The work-shop takes place in Berlin, and is given by the aforementioned artist Eva Pietzcker. I'm very excited and hope I'll be in good form by then, I've been feeling a bit under the weather (as they say) lately.  

I'm not the least bored these days. As if I ever am. I'm never bored. My only problem is time. If I had more time I would draw, do printing (lino, woodcut, silkscreen), knit, crochet, embroider and weave. . . .

 I sometimes ask myself if I have a problem of focus. Am I too scattered? But I try to reassure myself that it is all part of a process, and I have to let it happen, that there is some common denominator there, or some direction in all this frenzy. Direction, there is - in deed, and it's pointing southwards, to a particularly beautiful place on the Norwegian coast. More about that in another post...

happy new year!

Goodbye 2009. Welcome 2010. A new decennium, a new start.

This is a glimpse of what I've been doing lately, in the crafting department. Not so much knitting lately. My promise to write a pattern for the yellow cardigan remains to be fulfilled, I'm almost finished, but somehow I find it hard not to spend all my spare time drawing and clipping and playing in my basement studio. I've taken the silk-screen printing course (at Norske grafikeres verksted, Oslo) I mentioned earlier, and it was very inspiring and useful. But to my big disappointment, they don't rent out work-shop space for amateurs like my self. I looked forward to using the photo-emulsion technique, in brief; the whole array of printing gear, but no -. So now I'm hunting for somewhere else to practice silk-screen printing, if anyone reading this know of an open work-shop type of place, please let me know..

Meanwhile, I'm having more than enough to do experimenting with my new scanner/ printer and trying to get a grip of photoshop. I also got a new sewing machine for my birthday a while ago, which I have not yet put my hands on. But I would like to have access to a real silk-screen work-shop!

we make art

My five year old son and I cooperate in making art. We use a big sheet of paper. The medium varies: crayons, water color, potatoes. We put them on display in our very white kitchen and now they go public. I think they look good!

Migration

Playing with Lightroom (Photoshop "light"), black and white. I have a free-trial, and really like it. But it's expensive..

A few words on the reasons for this migration: There are several good things about wordpress; an advanced dashboard (!), easy to get your own domain, you can add pages (which you can't in blogger).. but I just cannot seem to get it to look the way I want. And looks are important, I admit to that. I wanted bigger photos, a customized header, nicer fonts, in short: a cleaner look. But going from wordpress to Blogger is much more difficult than the other way around. I ended up using somebody's homemade recipe. The result was not excellent, it took ages to upload the blog ( I think my clandestine import/ export business is to blame for  this) there must be too much information in the homemade stew.. So I had to delete most of my earlier posts. Well, well - I'm not so sentimental about that (only a bit annoyed because I have lost a few comments to my posts along the way).  I will keep my wordpress blog for a while anyway.

So, I hope you like my new look, and keep stopping by!

Testing

I have imported my blog from wp to blogger, just to test a little.. My active blog will still be www.thorvalda.com until I have sorted things out.

Finished product

The Side Tied Sweater (couldn't come up with a better name yet) is finished. I have worn it a lot already, at work too. I'm quite happy with it. I felted it very carefully, on 30 degrees (celsius) and with a tiny bit of pine-sol (grønnsåpe). As expected it shrunk, but not very much, and the texture changed of course - which was my intention. Pattern instructions are nearly finished.

Mountain-knitting

Not so long ago I went to my parents cabin in the mountains, in Rauland near Hardangervidda. I went on my own, man and kids left behind. Peace and quiet, I must admit I enjoyed every minute of it. And I had plenty of knitting and reading time, too, because the weather was not so perfect. Which made it legit to sit inside.



The yellow sweater on the photo is now finished, and the pattern is about to be written out. I knit it in garter stitch, and that is why I chose to knit back-and-forth and not in the round. The sweater has some similarities to the Honeypie-baby jacket, it's buttoned (or actually tied, as you will see in photos soon to come) on the side, and it has a rather prominent border of stitch pattern.


The sleeves are set-in sleeves (as opposed to raglan), but they are knitted together with the front- and back pieces, not sown up.


Well, it wasn't all knitting. I also had me some strolls up the mountain side. I so much love this view.







And the drive back home was beautiful too, I do love the countryside, and I especially love Telemark.. these are taken on the way from Rauland to Notodden.

Farmlife

Some glimpses from our summer at the farm.





This is where we stay. Our little red "bryggerhus", it's supposed to be the oldest building on the farm.



By the sea, such beauty.

And this summer the unthinkable happened.. The huge oil spill catastrophe caused by the tanker FullCity. We tried to do some cleaning up, but I don't know if it was of any help. Some say the oil will be gone by next summer, some say it will take decades. Seabirds are dead by the hundreds and life in the sea is contaminated as well. Even though our area wasn't among the worst, it was still pretty bad in some places. Lumps of oil, a thin film of oil on the surface of the sea, the smell of oil from seaweed..



The flowers are innocent and unaware of human hybris and sloppiness, a fatal combination indeed.



And so is our one-year-old little girl and her favorite animal, Pus.