Art & Books: October 2004 Archives

Today in studio we did a series of exercises in landscape drawing. We used watercolours and these soluble graphite pencils. So now I'm very good at drawing desert landscapes, which might be useful if I ever had to work as a renderer in Arizona. I can't even tell you how unlikely it is that I will move somewhere hot and dry, where the politics is conservative and the cheese is unnaturally orange, and do a job that involves drawing all day.

Anyway, I thought I'd show you some of those drawings, on account of how you're a captive audience and all. I will leave out the wash exercises, because frankly they were pretty boring, being mostly designed to explain wash techniques to a bunch of students who mostly had never done any before.

I confess that I have always played fast and loose with gauge in knitting, and I now admit that if I am to crochet lace, I have to stop that misbehaviour.

Here's what I've been working on lately:

They look kinda funny, don't they? That's because I've been using the thread I bought, plus a crochet hook I had, rather than following the directions. I guess that's not such a great idea. I mean, the one on the left was supposed to be able to fit twelve of those leaf thingies, and I barely squeezed in eight.

Actually, the one on the right appears to be mostly fine; I kinda psyched myself out reading the pattern, which was written in French, and tore half the thing out then started to work on it again before getting frustrated with trying to translate and decode at the same time, plus there's all this garbage about what a single crochet or double crochet actually is, which is crazy.

Anyway, I'm going to get the proper hook and thread and try that first one again. If I were feeling really energetic, I would just get a bunch of new hooks and see how it came out, but I've got to build a model by Friday afternoon, so it's not going to happen.

Here's where I've gotten on the lace doily I've been practising with. It's not exactly what the pattern said to do, but what the pattern said to do made no sense, so I made some of it up. Well, it looks like the picture in the book.

I actually haven't done much on it in days, because I can't figure out how to crochet while driving, drawing, or doing three dimensional force calculations on beams. Same thing with playing the mandolin, which I also find frustrating and enjoyable in the same way.

Changing to crochet thread helped a lot, which has led me to toss out the ball of Lion Microspun, as delightful as it is for a synthetic. I didn't get enough to knit anything with it, and I'm clearly never going to be able to crochet with it worth a damn.

I've been considering buying a pattern book, actually, which is a step in the mainstream direction for me. The things in it are very simple, but they use some of the funky new yarns in interesting ways, including one shawl that I've been puzzling over. It's clearly a very simple design, but three yarns are twisted together and apart to make a texture that is amazing in the photograph. That's the sort of thing I can see needing a pattern to do. I also saw some books with charts of various crochet (and knit) stitches, and thought those looked interesting, but I'm trying not to spend huge amounts of money right now as I just spent something like $1,000 on textbooks and supplies. No kidding. Anyway.