Todays thoughts...

After today's visit to Lee Mills and Claires lecture, Evangeline, Abbey and me (Liz) had a mini meeting to catch up on what we are actually doing in this project as Claire's lecture kind of scared us!!

It's become clear that we are all taking very different approaches to our project in the archive, which we've decided is absolutely fine as we are still going to go ahead with writing an article as our group project about our experiences at the archive, HOWEVER, we need to make sure in our article that we are promoting and advertising the archive as somewhere anyone can go to learn new things and do a bit of archiving, and not just inform on what we've been doing there. Therefore, each of us really do need to find some really interesting things to be writing about in our final article;
I think to link in with our initial ideas of collecting stories about pieces in the archive we can all gain "stories" of our own from our experiences and this is what we will write about.

so far....

Liz - i'm exploring cable knitting for my project because I love it and it's something my Nan is amazing at. As a knitter I've not actually mastered the art of cabling before, so my role in this project is learning from the ladies and the stories we've heard about (specifically the Princes fisherman sweater) to learn some new techniques. As we don't have unlimited access to the archive and the ladies there I'm going to use my Nan to help me with techniques i'm unsure of, and listen to some of her stories about knitting and look at pieces she has knitted in the past and treat my Nan as a mini family archive of knit.

Abbey - exploring the cross over of drawing and printed designs into knit

Evangeline - exploring knitted miniatures

Meg - exploring the cross over between art and knit

Imogen - War knitting? (please can you blog so we know what you are up to!!)

I think we are all looking at really interesting and completely different takes on knitting which I think will make for a really interesting and diverse article as our final piece!

So far I have...

Taught myself to cable from one of the patterns we've sorted through whilst we've been at the archive!

And today, Ruth helped me pick out part of the pattern of the Little Prince's fishing sweater and taught me how to begin knitting in the round on 4 needles!

The yarn and needles I used to begin knitting in the round today are spares from the archive that they will not be able to archive as there is no indication of make or story behind them. I liked this as I'm giving things that have just been sitting in the archive unused a new life by learning new knitting techniques!!