Colour my World

I'm going to be teaching colourwork next month at Morris and Sons in Melbourne. It will be a two day workshop Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th June - I'll be covering colour theory, how to choose colours and how to knit with them and everyone will get to make a hat using the techniques of their choice.

Meanwhile, I get to work up class samples and play with colour. Fun!

Knot the Done Thing

Interesting results of last week's experiment with variegated yarn. The yarn has very long repeats of colour so the neckwarmer and hat looks as if they have been knit with different colourways. They haven't. Both pieces used the same ball of Wisdom Poems Sock yarn together with Madeline Tosh Light in Fig and Antler. As you can see, the neckwarmer/cowl (call it what you will) didn't get out of the green/tan repeats, while the hat is all autumnal oranges and browns (with a hint of green at the bottom of the ribbing.) I would have preferred a mix of all of the colours in each piece, but all in all, a reasonable result for an experiment.

And my verdict on the yarn? Love the MadelineTosh Light. But the Poems Sock??? Well... it's really inconsistently spun with occasional yarn blobs and weak sections;

And there were knots, which wouldn't have been so bad if the mill had continued the colour sequence on either side. But no, they ignored that. There were two knots in the ball; one where the colour jumped from green  to brown and other (below) which switched from orange to brown. Very poor quality control.

It also seems odd that Poems is marketed as a sock yarn. It's very fuzzy - as you can see from the cast on edge of the hat, the fibres were already fulling slightly as I knit. Goodness knows how it would wear as a sock. I wouldn't recommend it.

One is One

Oddballs! All knitters know what I'm talking about - those lone skeins of yarn that lurk in the back of your stash. Often bought on impulse, perhaps not enough to make anything, and refusing to co-operate with other yarns.

Here's one of mine, a lone ball of Wisdom Poems Sock Yarn  bought at the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show a couple of years ago.

Actually, as you can see from the manufacturer's web site, the ball is enough to knit a pair of socks:

But somehow, "knitting it straight" doesn't doesn't do justice to the colourful promise of the skein. As with so many multi-coloured yarns, the finished product disappoints. What to do? Add more colour - of course! Poems Sock is an unusual composition, a bit of a rarity in my stash. I've got loads of sock yarn, many multis, but not many yarns like this, which is a hairy, wool and nylon blend with a single like construction (to be honest, I'm skeptical that it would wear well as socks). But it is similar in weight, hand and construction to Madeline Tosh Merino Light a lovely yarn which I have been experimenting with recently.What's more I bought an underweight, oversaturated "one of a kind" skein of MLT in the fig colourway which goes beautifully with the multi:

With the two skeins of yarn I should have enough to make a loose, medium sized cowl (neckwarmer). No pattern, I'll design on the fly, depending on how the yarn and colours behave. Sooooo - 3.25 needles, cast on 204 sts (a number that is divisible by 2,4, and 6 so will give me a bit of flexibility choosing stranded patterns.) First up a little bit of corrugated ribbing:

I'm more and more convinced that this yarn would make terrible socks. It's very hairy and is fulling slightly as I knit (and shedding all over the couch.) So far, the colours are playing nicely together with the long repeats from the multi skein giving a nice, graded effect. However, as the multi unwinds it is becoming obvious that the fig may not provide enough contrast with the deeper brown sections of the skein of Poem. Which means adding another colour :) Rather than frogging back (which would, I suspect, damage the Poem yarn and drive me bonkers), I'll introduce the new colour by adding a braid between the ribbing and stranded section of the cowl. So now I have Wisdom Poems Sock in Pumpkin Patch together with MLT Fig and MLT Antler (lovely, pale creamy brown). It's starting to look cosy...

Camera Obscura: Struggles with an SLR

I've always loved photography. It's a perfect blend of art, technology and commentary; equal parts science and magic. My own first attempts at making pictures were with a Kodak Instamatic, bought with carefully hoarded 20c per week deposits from my primary school bank account. That little camera was with me on the boat when we emigrated from England when I was 8. 

I'm told I wasted a lot of film; but there was so much fun in the routine of fitting the special sealed film cartridge, the solid clunk and click of the camera, the special fizzing flash cubes and even the ritual trip to the chemist to wait for the results, ordinary as they were:

Achille Lauro, Naples - Mount Vesuvius,1968

On special weekends my father would turn the bathroom into a darkroom to develop black and white films. I would sit in the red lamplight watching the images magically appearing. On extra special occasions, I was allowed to take charge of the stop watch. There was such a feeling of power, conjuring the floating pictures around. 

Dad particularly loved his cine camera, an 8mm Bolex movie camera:
My role in movie making was to sit at the side of the projector and make sure that the film didn't spool onto the floor in a tangle... it often did.

But even with such an early start, I've always been a  hit and miss photographer. I've read handbook after handbook on cameras and photographic theory. Pored over works by inspirational photographers - Adams, Avedon, Curtis, Dombrovskis, Snowdon... I always diligently read camera manuals  - cover to cover. At the time, it all seems straight forward; ISO - check!, Aperture - check!, f stops - check! But get the camera in my hands and all that goodly wisdom bolts out of the window.

I've thought long and hard about this and decided it's not a lack of patience, more like anxiety over missing a special shot, combined with a lack of discipline. And I think the anxiety also has something to do with the way that different people perceive things. Typically, when John and I are photographing a scene he will carefully set up landscapes and panoramic views:

Sundalsora, Norway

Hobitton Film Set, New Zealand

whereas I tend to see smaller details and vignettes out of corner of my eye:

The Green Dragon Pub taken by John:

John in the doorway of the Green Dragon (taken by me):

It's a bit like looking at a Brueghel; John tends to see the whole painting, I'm drawn to faces in the crowd.

A CAE photography tutor once told me that I needed to completely let go of the auto camera functions and be prepared to get a lot worse at taking pictures, before I could get any better. She was also strongly against "wasting time in post processing". For a while, I tried to be more disciplined, still guiltily flipping back and forth between auto and manual, feeling bad about the amount of time I spent tinkering with images. No more. I've decided to keep on taking pictures using whichever way (or camera) suits the situation or my mood. Without the pressure of always trying to "do it properly" I've started to take more photos, learn by experience and guess what, the fun is back!

After this minor epiphany I took a 3 day workshop with Phil Fogle. ('The Image' Introduction to Photography, Lighting and Presentation). A thoroughly enjoyable workshop, concentrating on photographing flat and 3D artwork, texture and surface. I learned a lot (and was inspired to buy a new camera!), but as the workshop wore on I found myself wandering away from the set exercises on lighting and depth of field: 

 

and compelled to capture a record of the what was going on around me:

Patient? yes. Disciplined? Perhaps not!

Back log #1: China - September 2012

We visited China during September 2012. It was a wonderful trip and I intended to blog at the time, but most forms of social media were blocked in Beijing.

Why has it taken me so long to catch up? The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.

Beijing smog is notorious and levels soared dramatically during early 2013. So we expected our visit to be filled with hazy, autumn days. Day one lived up to expectations:
 

But the wind got up during the night and the next morning...

 

We always try to start any overseas trip with a walk in the daylight to try and fight jet lag. So first up - a walk to the Beijing Ancient Observatory -  a pre-telescopic observatory built in 1442 during the Ming Dynasty (and only 10 minutes' walk from our hotel in the Dongcheng District.) The site is administered by the Beijing Planetarium, but is now a museum and houses several ancient and wonderful astronomical instruments;

My personal favourite, the whimsical and ever-so-slightly demonic bunny style clepsydra (water clock):

Later that day, armed with a sheaf of helpful hints and translations from the Beijing Knitters Guild we made it out to a recommended yarn shop...why yes, the yarn is extremely cheap and I did buy some...

 We walked back.

Day 2: Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City Another beautiful autumn day in China. Tiananmen Square, to the right the Great Hall of the People, to the left of the picture, the Monument to the People's Heroes. (The National Museum of China is on the far left of the square, out of shot).

And at the far end of the square, Mao Zedong's Mausoleum. By 8am the queue to visit Mao's tomb has already stretched into a two hour wait. We didn't. Seems to me the huge line of people says more  than a 36 year old corpse ever could.

Down at the opposite end of the square, the queue to enter the Forbidden City was a little shorter.

Several hundred photos later and what can you say that hasn't been said before? Staggering.

And here's what I was photographing on those doors...

We walked back from the Forbidden City too. There weren't many other options.

Part Two: Day in the Country: Mutianyu and The Great Wall
The following week was taken up with work and conferences - with occassional snatched visits to the shops:

 
 

and for high powered haggling at the Silk Street Market):

We still hadn't seen the Great Wall, and the only opportunity was to visit on a Saturday. We were  warned that the Wall can get incredibly crowded and that Saturday was the busiest day of the week, particularly with such gorgeous weather. But decided to go anyway, choosing one of the more rural and wilder sections of the Wall at Mutianyu.

The Beijing Office chose a highly recommended guide for us - again we had been warned that far too many operators include "surprise" side trips to tourist traps selling souvenirs. We wanted to avoid that. We didn't quite manage it. In fact there were two stops, a whistlestop tour through a Jade factory, with a low key (and unsuccessful) sales pitch. 

Our second side trip was unexpected and fascinating - a cloisonne workshop.

We were told that it was one of the last workshops of its type in China. Who knows? Certainly the working conditions were primitive, no sign of OH&S here:

The sales pitch was even more low key here, but I love cloisonne so we did buy a couple of small pieces. And then, finally, it was higher up and further in to the star attraction- the Great Wall. 

Sections of the wall at Mutianyu are very steep and there are three choices for viewing them: walk all the way from the car park, take a chair lift (up to the right hand side of the wall and take a water slide back down), take a cable car up to the left hand side and the highest sections of the wall. 

With no time to walk from the car park and no desire to take a water slide back, we opted for the cable car. And what a fabulous surprise - there was hardly anyone up there:

By some fluke - we had scored a brilliant, uncrowded day. Not only that, but it seems that most people choose the chair lift /water slide option, so we had a fabulous, unhurried visit. Our guide, Brian, was very excited - saying that he had never seen it so deserted (he took nearly as many photos as we did):

 

This photo was taken two weeks later at the Badaling section of the Wall: