Arrowmont Summer 2013: Day 4

 Again, today has seemed incredibly long! It was kinda dreary here, but weather like that always makes me want to knit, so I guess it is a good thing. I can barely remember half the stuff I did today, but I will give it a shot.

Foggy mountain.....breakdown?

This morning I (again!) skipped breakfast and headed straight to class. I finished my knitted globe structure during class, and the class was able to stiffen the globes with fab-brick stiffener. The way we did this was by saturating our limp knit globes in the stiffener, then we inserted a regular ol' deflated party balloon into the globe. Once the balloon was in, we carefully blew up the balloon and hung the globes on a wire to dry.

Here are our globes stiffening.

The next type of knitting we got to focus on was circular knitting. Instead of beginning with teaching the class how to knit in the round, which most of us already knew, Adrienne introduced us to spool knitting and I cord knitting. We were even then given supplies to make our own spool knitters! This way, we were able to technically see how knitting in a circle works.

Adrienne teaching us how to spool knit on her handmade spool knitter.

Some of Adrienne's spool knitters. I would love to collect these!

While we were knitting away on our newly made spool knitters, Adrienne talked to us about some great publications for knitters to keep on their radar.

The list of publications:

-Fiber Art Now magazine This is the magazine that replaced Fiber Arts magazine once it went out of business.

-Surface Design Association journal An overall great fiber arts magazine, not just about surface design.

-Textile Forum magazine The European fiber arts magazine.

-The Australian Forum for Textile Arts (TAFTA) A magazine that highlights Australian fiber art.

Great fiber arts publications...on my messy table.

Following our discussion on the great recommended magazines we then moved onto knitting with wire. Very intimidating, but really not that bad once you get started. We worked with 20 gauge annealed iron wire to make out sample sculptures. The most surprising thing about knitting with wire is that you really don't use knitting needles, all you do is make loops and create the structure. Wire is so stiff it holds the knit stitches shape, therefore relieving you of having to use needles. Crazy right? This type of wire was very messy to work with so by the end of the day all of our hands were black.

My wire sculpture in progress.

Kieu knitting a wire vessel. Note her very black fingers!

After a bit of wire knitting we all took a field trip to the local Gatlinburg knitting shop, called the Smokey Mountain Spinnery! I of course forgot my camera when I went, but the shop had all the great things any knitter, spinner or weaver could ever want! I will probably go back before the week is up for some much needed yarn therapy, and perhaps I will do a review of the shop for the blog later.

Tonight was the artists in residence studio visit, so after class all the students went to see what the artists in residence were working on. The studios were decently sized, I wouldn't mind trying to apply in the future!

Tomorrow my class will begin plein air knitting, which means we will go out into nature to knit natural textures with all of our newly learned techniques! It should be very challenging, but in a fun way. Hopefully it is a little drier though!

XOXO