ConnieLene – KnitDesigner

I am now on beret six – there is some minor madness when one keeps on playing with a piece. These have all been created using Vero yarn but in the different colours that I have here in the Netherlands.

I do miss my yarns that are still in New Zealand.

How can I miss yarn? I cannot even remember what was in my stash there – just that there were lots of yarns, in lots and lots of colours, from many different places in the world. But I do miss the variety in colour, yarn type, do not have sufficient variety here to create pieces as I was doing in New Zealand. I have purchased a lot of different yarns here in the Netherlands and some in Switzerland and in Denmark – I just do not have the quantity, colour range and yarn types here as I did have at home. It takes time to build up a new stash, doesn’t it?

What to do?

I don’t know.

So right now I am knitting berets.

Originally this was in response to a commission from a friend in Australia. But now I need to consider – do I continue with these? Do I complete the commission? Well yes that I must do, which means that beret 7 must be a funky, fuzzy, multicoloured piece. Then I must write up the pattern and then get back to that carbon footprint bag. Maybe I just put the two graphs out, one for the intarsia footprints and the other for carbon footprint using shadow knitting and leave you to decide – should it be on a bag, blanket, pram cover, cushion or on a sweater – should you happen to want a sweater with a foot print or two on it.

I guess that is what should be done.

The beret pattern – will include one in stocking stitch, and one felted from a stocking stitch knit. I won’t try to define the multicolour, multi fibre, intarsia one – that will be free form with little guidance.

I have finally finished the graphs for my Carbon Footprint design. Graph 1 – can be used for intarsia knitting and Graph 2 is a line by line Shadow Knitting opportunity.

It is not that the graphs themselves that have taken so long – I just have too many projects going at one time – and that snowball white Haarlem Ball Warmer keeps on beckoning.

As I said in an previous post I have purchased a digitally restored eBook which included the pattern for a crocheted bathmat with a chart to use to embroider a footprint on to the crocheted bathmat. This pattern was originally published by The American Thread Company, Star Rug Book No. 93, in 1952.

I have altered the embroidered design to make the shadow knitting work better. I am knitting the bag, and I have knitted the design itself several times and I have found that it is not essential to work with a solid light and a solid dark yarn to make this work. I have created it with variageted lightish yarn and a black mohair – and it is great.

The bag is being knitted with cream and rusty red coloured cottons. The curiosity of working with shadow knitting – is that it is not always so clear that it is working while you are knitting it. So when I finished the second wall hanging I was pleased to see that it did work (and better than the first) and my carbon footprint certainly exposed itself when viewed on the angle.

Not many carbon footprints in this world are so clear.

Why oh why did I say I was creating this bag pattern – I would rather be knitting my next 1 or 2 or 3 Haarlem Ball warmers – No rest for the wicked, I will just have to do both

Danish born, brought up in New Zealand and have been living in the Netherlands since Sept. 2008 because Best Beloved has work here at present.

I have been knitting since the mid 1950’s and began designing my own pieces in my early 20’s. These early designs related to the yarns I could purchase very cheaply from bargain bins and at end of the season – so there was not a big range to choose from for any piece. But buying yarns this way meant I became quite innovative in my colour and yarn use and very early discovered that the required yarn for any pattern is simply to force one to buy that specific yarn and is so absolutely untrue.

Designing and crafting has always been part of my life and I have created pieces using various skills including embroidery, basket weaving, marbling, tie dying fabrics, crocheting, knitting etc.

I love cooking and had an experience which will never be forgotten as a young teenager of 15/16 where I was one of 12 finalists in “Cook of the Year” a New Zealand recipe and cooking competition. This meant I had to be part of a bakeoff – where I cooked my own recipe (the one that I had put forward which placed me in the finals) and a recipe of one of the other finalists. Pretty scary as a young person and of course I drew the recipe of the ultimate winner to be created along with my own recipe.

My “real work” work from the end of the 1970’s was in library systems – first helping put the first library catalogue onto a computer system (data entry, form filling), then working with the Dynix Library System first at Auckland Public Library, then with Dynix itself as a library Support person eventually becoming Manager of Dynix New Zealand. In early 2000 I became the Library Systems Manager at Whangarei District Library where my most interesting project was establishing a Mobile Library Service for the Whangarei District – from buying and outfitting the bus, working out bus routes, and sorting out the technology as well as managing the library system itself.

Now I can barely manage my own computer – especially in this last 18 months with my computer in storage for the first 6 months and using Best Beloved’s work laptop when it was available. Once we were established here with our stuff in a house we did get mine out of storage and I lived and worked with blue screens and crashes for nearly 8 months. I have now replaced it and I do not like my very first laptop, and I hate office 2007 and I hate Vista so far.

I have created / designed many many more pieces than I now can remember and they have gone to many places in the world – from New Zealand to Denmark and England. Now that I have a digital camera – I still manage to complete pieces and not photograph them – but I really do try to photograph everything I create.

Craft / Art Experience:

1973/74 – Cook Street Market – Auckland. I designed and created knit and crochet garments for babies & children, hats & waistcoats of many colours for adults. One passion was multi coloured shawls which I knitted and crocheted. I did also create garments after tie dying the fabrics. I am a lousy sewer but did create hippy style shirts to sell at the market as well. I made many natural cane baskets – banished myself to the bathroom with a bathtub of soaking cane and sat there weaving. Loved the results, hated the process (that is sitting in a cold bathroom – I loved the weaving and creating), and it played havoc with my hands and back.

My mother and I did have a market stall at the Parnell markets where I sold machine knitted sweaters and received my first commisions for fair isle machine knitted sweaters and cardigans – when I had had the machine for only a week or two. Now that was a bit of a leap of faith on part of the purchaser – but it did work out in the end. The knitting machine didn’t last long as a passion as I like knitting whereever I am, in the car, at the dinner table, watching TV (depends on the piece being knitted), at friends and relatives homes everywhere). In fact the knitting machine never really became a passion at all.

1976/78 – Craft group in Titirangi, New Zealand – often at my home where we pooled our knowledge of knitting, crochet, basket weaving as well as the tie dying of fabrics – probably the first “stitch ‘n Bitch” group in New Zealand.

1982/3 – Craft group at Arahoe Primary School – Titirangi, New Zealand. I loved teaching the kids and they were open to trying anything so I did teach various crafts to them including crochet, basket weaving and creating string pictures and more.

1990 – Workshop “Marbling on fabric & paper” with Maxine Lovegrove – Auckland, New Zealand which helped develop my colour use in my beautiful pieces.

In the Netherlands I have added felting, shadow knitting, Hyperbolic planes, and now knitted graffiti to what I do. It is amazing how a new place can encourage you to extend yourself.

I am passionate about colour and texture and uses my knits to surprise and encourage in the wearer a confidence of expression. A confidence to wear the unusual and to enjoy how it feels and how the colours shift and adjust depending on the light of the day or space one is in. A confidence to wear magic – and it is magic.

I am delighted when someone is passionate about what I do.

I have finally established my presence at “The Place to buy and sell all things handmade” ETSY.

Well it is not exactly a presence yet. I have managed to add 4 items to each shop and to set up a basic environment. It is amazing what has to be done to establish a great cyberspace presence. It will take me a bit of time to get my head around the process.

See Connielene and Unique Boutique

The very silly reason for 2 ETSY shops is that I didn’t read all the detail properly, well I didn’t absorb all the detail properly and added Unique Boutique before realising that my user name was also my shop name. So I will see how two Etsy shops go and decide later whether it is worth the effort or not.

My aim with Connielene is to include those pieces which are unique – these pieces will generally use many, many different colours; many, many different fibres and should be exciting and magic to wear. They will also be impossible to ever repeat. They will be the pieces that could be in exhibitions.

I will also include my edgy fashion pieces like my NOT fox fur capelet. These I can repeat, and do, and they have become an important part of my collection.

In Unique Boutique I will include the things I create with only one or two yarns and/or colours and are quite simple – but each will still be unique – as I do not usually purchase enough yarn to repeat exactly any piece.

I will also include my shadow knitted wall hangings and new felted pieces in the ConnieLene shop.

I am going to write an ebook on my favourite knitting subject – Intarsia. The Intarsia free form process is my passion – but the technicality of working in the round, using a graph, working out the colour scheme etc will all be covered. It will be Intarsia from go to whereever it could take me and of course you. I would hope that my passion for Intarsia knitting might also make a convert of you to this method of colourwork in your knitting.

Would such a book be of interest to you? If so please let me know by emailing me with “I wish to be informed on the progress of the ebook on Intarsia knitting” in the subject field.

Yahoo – I am creating a knitting pattern for a bag with footprints on the side in the shadow knitting technique. The foot print in black will be your carbon footprint.

It will include the footprint knitting graph and it might well include the instructions to create your own footprint chart from your foot. I hope to have this pattern on Ravelry soon. There is just too much to do between now and the very silly season to complete this at my original January 10th date. We have family coming (driving) from Switzerland to us in Haarlem for Christmas – and I don’t think it will snow, and the canals will not be frozen over as they were last year. It will still be beautiful.

Best Beloved’s foot will be in the photos – I haven’t asked (told) him yet – but the hairy foot will be his, mine are just too odd looking and besides I am going to be the one with the camera.

Shadow Knitting - Small wall hanging

Shadow Knitting is something I have often thought about working with but had never quite got to trying it out. I didn’t want to create pictures as such, but would like to see how I could explore its use as an art form.

I had the opportunity to put forward a proposal for an art piece to the International Textile Exhibition being held in the Netherlands in 2010. The theme is “Sporen” or “Tracks” – I have taken the view that what we will leave behind will be plastic, lots of plastic; or the current hotspot, The Carbon Footprint. They didn’t get excited about the piece I created but it was an interesting experiment with shadow knitting and I am going to continue working with it. I can see such creative and artistic opportunities.

On the way to my “Carbon Footprint” art piece I created several small wall hangings to fit into the 20″ by 20″ frame as required for the exhibition. The first was a knitted scene – which I then felted. I like it well enough, but not enough to put it forward. Yes I could have embellished it and I will probably do that sometime.

My next piece was to include plastic, as my view of the world is that we will all finally be buried under a mountain of plastic. I roughly cut various plastic bags into strips, nothing too tidy as plastic is not tidy. I also visited a very dim “rabbit warren” of a junk shop here in Haarlem and came out with many odd plastic things – stuff that had been created as advertising gimmicks – key rings, swizzle sticks, some toy bits etc which I was going to include in my knitted Everest. It is pure rubbish for which I paid an exorbitant amount of money. It was stuff that should never have been created and had been doomed to linger on the very dusty shelves of a large, dim, untidy, disorganised junk shop until the crazy knitter rolled in. Of course if I had used it – maybe I would have had to go back and find some more. My hands were rather blackish and grubby when I emerged and it was not that good for my lungs either. I did knit my 20″ by 20″ Everest – of plastic using the shadow knitting technique. I like it, but it didn’t quite demonstrate what I had hoped and time was running out – and by then my best beloved had suggested “The Carbon Footprint”. I think Everest is the beginnings of a much larger piece, 20″ by 20″ was too small for my Everest.

I purchased a digitally restored eBook which included the pattern for a crocheted bathmat with a chart to embroider a footprint on the crocheted bathmat. This pattern was originally published by The American Thread Company, Star Rug Book No. 93, in 1952.

I redesigned the chart for a knitted foot print after I had tried and failed with the chart as it was. The re-engineered footprint was then knitted in black mohair, with the background of a natural coloured varigated sock yarn and finished with a black crochet edge. It was not deemed suitable for the exhibition BUT it has set me off in a new direction and I had thought I would only ever create with many, many colours and fibres and that I would use the intarsia method of knitting till I slip this mortal coil. Not so – I am learning so many more knitting techniques here in the Netherlands.

I think of that and wonder why that could be and the only conclusion I can come to is that in New Zealand there are many things happening around me and I am easily led from my work.

Here there is only me, this little house, my yarn, my best beloved is at work, I shop for groceries, walk the canals, watch the birds, ride my bike (not alone you understand – we go out on the bikes together), out on the polders and to the North sea, visit museums and galleries – there is really nothing to interfere with the creative process – so I am more creative.

I don’t know.

Shadow knitting – a technique of knitting alternating rows of dark and light yarn to produce a subtle patterning that appears and disappears depending on the angle from which it is viewed. The shadow knitting queen is Vivian Hoxbro.