New Textiles 2011

The knitting pieces are soft with smooth surface. I got the inspiration from Japanese dry garden, in which they use white sands to create various curves. My initial idea is to create a piece of white knitting with bulged curves, such as water waves or ripples, all over it.
Up to now the idea seems too romantic. I currently can produce bulged straight lines and waves rather than the curved ones.
I use the fine flat knitting machine to make the pieces. This machine is very hard to use for beginners. The yarns kept droping from the hooks in the process. And when I tried to knit off the piece, it was very difficult as the needles are so small.

For the materials, I chose the linen yarn and the cotton yarn instead of normal wool yarns. The linen yarn creates a very interesting quality, though it breaks very easily. The cotton one has very smooth surface. But I had to “manually” stretch the yarn before each knitting line, as it is not wrapped around bobbin cone.
For the long “wave”.I tried several times. Then I used the method of simply adding the lines along the knitting direction. The result looks good and smooth, although the middle parts always merged down as they were lack of supporting.
For the adjacent “short waves”, I made one bulge while holding the other unknitting in D position. And then I began knitting the other part, while holding the previous one unknitting.
For the skrewed piece, I gradually pushed the needles to D position one by one while knitting. Every time the “newly pushed” D position needle should be far from the knitting end.

Basically the result looks good. If time permits I will use the mid-machine instead and try other ways to create a real bulged curve.