Coral Corrolation

Are you more on-the-ball than I? If so, then you already know that The Ecology Action Centre has teamed up with The Loop Craft Cafe to create a 3d display for World Ocean Day. This knit and crochet model of Nova Scotia's Ocean Floor will follow many of the principles outlined at the Coral Reef Project at the Institute for Figuring (the people who brought you the crocheted universe).
I am really getting into this.
If you can drop by The Loop Thursday night I will be interrupting regular knitting time to talk about hyperbolic crochet and to give a brief amigurumi tutorial.
The spacial concepts are a bit difficult at first, but applying them to fishies does help, and the actual crochet techniques are very basic. Most of the ideas can also be applied to knitting.
Check out The Loop's blog and the EAC's blog 'Stitchin Fish' for a list of 'must have' creatures. Submissions may be dropped off via either group. There is also quite a group of like minded folk on Facebook (so I'm told) and Ravelry is also abuzz.
ps now is the time to use up your eyelash yarn and phentex.

I have been thinking about

The flowers in the opening of In The Night Garden

Poirot

Oleana Sweaters

Naked Brothers Band

Louis Wain

The Evolution of the Stevie Shawl
TV Cluedo

Eleanor of Aquitaine
Roger Miller

Hyberbolic Space

Princess Lamballe

Tambouring

...but mostly-how to get to Casino Rama (north of Toronto)to see Stevie Nicks in June, and to Brooklyn to see The Dinner Party. (Two different road trips). Lord only knows what I wouldn't do...

Motifs for Camiknickers

Motifs have a way of multiplying when you're not looking. It's akin to the pot never boiling and several other thermodynamic adages of love which are too clever for me.

Even toasting their bottoms on the shop's rad however, could not spurn these 3" dc circles to propagate at the rate promised by Stitchcraft Magazine in 1933:

"....in fact two people working at it together, one crocheting and one stitching, could finish the whole thing in an afternoon."

Beans. I am pretty darn swift at double crochets but I feel like Ina Claire in "The Royal Family of Broadway"

If only my little circles could pick up on the spring in the air...like those pigeons on the sill...oh my.

...go visit The Loop Craft Cafe's new blog.

Charts; Birds of a Feather?

I have long disputed (and tried to ignore) the need for "Knitter's Graph Paper' vs. the regular kind used for Needlework and other academic graphy things. For the most part, images can be duplicated with normal, square graph paper, and the elongated stitches of knitted colour work aren't too upsetting ("They're slimming," I'd tell myself).

But I have found the conversion's limit. I had thought that if the gauge was small enough, such weird angles and slopes wouldn't be so troublesome and the image wouldn't look like a pixelated Luigi when I was hoping to settle for a pixelated Mario. At the 9st/1" to follow that's obviously bunk.
I've worked this in Assisi Embroidery; stitching only the background.These little birds are from Bibliothèque DMC Point de Croix Nouveaux Dessins, Ire Série c.1905(made available by http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.com/) and when they are cross stitched they are pert, pleasantly squat, and Escher-y.

Knit, they have goiters.
My Mushroom sweater however, is working out. So my new rule shall be Geometric yes, Pictorial no.

EDIT: Go grab some free knitter's graph paper here.