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I started knitting these blankets after I became interested in Kaffe Fassett’s style of knitting. The way he combined colours and textures reminded me of the ragrugs my mother weaves. I wondered if I could replicate the random patterns of my mother’s rugs in knitting by using Kaffe’s techniques. My first blanket therefore had defined stripes of light and dark shades, but in order to achieve the stripes I had to carry long lengths along the edges, so I settled on an overall pattern combining colours of similar tones using fewer shades.
As a child I enjoyed cutting strips of material for my mother’s rugs from (worn out) patterned clothes, seeing the pattern dissemble in the randomly patterned strips which were then reassembled in a third pattern in the rugs. In patchwork I enjoy cutting pieces of cloth into randomly patterned shapes in order to piece them together into a regular pattern. Later in my statistics training I was intrigued to study in depth the nature of random events.
The knitting illustrates the statistical theory as the yarns are used at random. When I start a new blanket I assemble yarns in similar shades – some 30 or 40 – and put them in order – any order will do – so that when I come to the end of one yarn, I pick the next one without having to decide whether it is a good match to the previous yarn. And while knitting it is exciting to find out what comes next, and how the blanket will end up looking.
An aspect of ragrugs and patchwork that appeals to me very much is the opportunity to reuse old materials. Most of the yarn for the blankets comes from knitted sweaters from charity shops. I unravel them, washing the yarn before using it again. This works well for natural fibres, such as wool, mohair, silk, angora, cotton, alpaca and cashmere, as the kinks will disappear. The unravelled yarns also have a textural quality lacking in new yarns, in particular if the sweater has shrunk in washing. I enjoy handling textiles so much that I nearly enjoy the unravelling more than the knitting.
I started knitting these blankets after I became interested in Kaffe Fassett’s style of knitting. The way he combined colours and textures reminded me of the ragrugs my mother weaves. I wondered if I could replicate the random patterns of my mother’s rugs in knitting by using Kaffe’s techniques. My first blanket therefore had defined stripes of light and dark shades, but in order to achieve the stripes I had to carry long lengths along the edges, so I settled on an overall pattern combining colours of similar tones using fewer shades.
As a child I enjoyed cutting strips of material for my mother’s rugs from (worn out) patterned clothes, seeing the pattern dissemble in the randomly patterned strips which were then reassembled in a third pattern in the rugs. In patchwork I enjoy cutting pieces of cloth into randomly patterned shapes in order to piece them together into a regular pattern. Later in my statistics training I was intrigued to study in depth the nature of random events.
The knitting illustrates the statistical theory as the yarns are used at random. When I start a new blanket I assemble yarns in similar shades – some 30 or 40 – and put them in order – any order will do – so that when I come to the end of one yarn, I pick the next one without having to decide whether it is a good match to the previous yarn. And while knitting it is exciting to find out what comes next, and how the blanket will end up looking.
An aspect of ragrugs and patchwork that appeals to me very much is the opportunity to reuse old materials. Most of the yarn for the blankets comes from knitted sweaters from charity shops. I unravel them, washing the yarn before using it again. This works well for natural fibres, such as wool, mohair, silk, angora, cotton, alpaca and cashmere, as the kinks will disappear. The unravelled yarns also have a textural quality lacking in new yarns, in particular if the sweater has shrunk in washing. I enjoy handling textiles so much that I nearly enjoy the unravelling more than the knitting.
The photographs show a typical ragrug (from Astrid Johnson m fl: Vackra trasmattor och andra vävar, ICA bokförlag, 1985, ISBN 91 534 0709 1), and close ups of my first (filten A1) and my third (filten A3) blankets.
1 kommentar:
Oh, I love this idea! The results look fabulous. :)
And yes, I do live in Finland. :)
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