I'm always trying to get better scans of the process of working in yarn ends at the end of a stranded color knitting project.

The first thing I do is move each yarn tail in the direction it came from (on either side of the row join).




Now I start doing reverse duplicate stitch on the back of the work. I always make sure to pull the yarn tail in the OPPOSITE direction it was coming from to help match up the joins on the right side of the work and get rid of any holes.

Reverse duplicate stitch on the back of stockinette is two diagonal actions with a tapestry needle threaded with the yarn end. Each diagonal action catches two purl bumps and as you go along the row you go through each purl bump twice which makes it virtually impossible for yarn ends to work their way loose.

Here is the second action. It is hard to show this properly because the various yarn floats at the back of the work get in the way. I just weave around and over them as I can but I suspect you could make this process completely invisible if you meticulously did reverse duplicate stitch UNDER all the floats.

You really don't have to do this for very many stitches as it does an excellent job of securing the yarn ends. I generally cut the yarn tails pretty close to the work as I'm confident they won't work their way loose.

Voila! You're done. There are some sections where you can see the yarn tail diagonally crosses some yarn floats but the actual reverse duplicate stitch isn't noticeable. Even better, it isn't noticeable from the right side of the work.

Theresa has done a great job of using both a photograph and some computer magic to show reverse duplicate stitch on stockinette HERE.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik died yesterday.
Few artists deserve the name of avant-garde artists as much as Paik did. His faith in the intimate link between technology and art was one of the fundaments of today's new art. Starting off in the early 60's, he was first more connected to live performance. In the 80's he moved towards large multi-monitor installations. He gave technology a soul. He made art seem fun and intelligent at the same time. At times it seemed as if the fun, experimental and/or esoteric aspects took over, leaving less room for intellectual aspects, but even those works had a power that mesmerized, hypnotized and inspired a whole generation of artists. Actually, come and think of it, he inspired more than a generation, since his works are still seen today as innovative and fresh.

Here is an excerpt from New Media in Art:

The (...) 'art'-oriented video histories will usually point to the day in 1965 when Korean-born Fluxus artist and musician Nam June Paik bought one of the first Sony Portapak video sets in New York, and tuyrned his camera on the Papal entourage that day making its way down Fifth Avenue. That, in this view, was the day video art was born. Paik apparently took the footage of the Pope, shot from a cab, and that night showed the results at an artists' hangout, the Cafe a GoGo.

more about Nam June Paik:

Sound Gardens

Hello again!

Here is something that has been around for some time as an idea, with a few small-scale realized projects - but now it seems to be growing quite fast.
The Tactical Sound Garden is an environment (i.e. potentially a physical space of any city) where users of devices such as iPods and other portable sound systems with wireless communication can discover the sounds implanted by others.
In practice this means one walks into a space and hears different sounds. As one moves along, the sounds (songs, noises, voices?) change, new ones appear.

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is a vehicle for exploring this via the design of an infrastructure: an open source software platform for cultivating public "sound gardens" within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture and ethic of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary public space.

Several interesting points about this sort of developments:
- A walkman stops being a synonym of alienation. It can become a shared experience.
- The trust in human goodness is boundless. As the average age of an iPod user (or, what's more significant, a "qualified user") drops, these Gardens, invisible to a common passer - by who might have pu social pressure to keep it tidy, can very well become depositories of some of the most uninspiring sound garbage. ("NOT INCLUDED in the Toolkit are regulations for governing the use (or abuse) of the garden. This is left to the gardeners to sort out. TSGs are intended as self-organizing systems.")
- The audio part of space suddenly becomes a brave new world. It will create specific, isolated communities that are a gem to any advertiser: they have money and time to spend. I wouldn't be surprized, then, if this artistic endeavor soon took on a new twist and became a sort of a commercial radio, where one can discover the wonderful soundscapes for the modest price of having them brought to you by "Chico-Chico, the chocolate that makes it all sound great".
- What exactly is a sound garden? Or rather, what can it be? Are there some possibilities we haven't thought of yet? Rhythms? Conversations? Plays? Games? Dances in public spaces? Lessons? What else?

Technorati: art installation, installation, art, contemporary art, new art, vvoi, vvoitek, modern art, cool

Inspired by the Tharp book, I decided to put photos of most of the items I've knitted in the past 7 years online at a free photo hosting service. If you go to http://photobucket.com/albums/e181/nanetteblanchard you can see 20 photos of hats, 32 of mittens and gloves, 48 of socks (2 pages), 19 of sweaters and 30 of my designs. It was definitely interesting to see everything I have knit together like that. I had no idea I'd knitted so many things of my own design and I saw clearly how much I really like bright colors.

In doing this experiment I also realized I had knit a 9th project from the Estonian book. I completely forgot I had knit Liidia's gloves. I have no clue what happened to them.

Here are the colors I'm using for Liivi's socks from Folk Knitting in Estonia. I'm making mine shorter without the calf shaping but I still think they're going to be pretty nice.

I'm currently reading an interesting book called The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life by choreographer Twyla Tharp. She includes many interesting creativity exercises and questions for your journal (she calls it your creative autobiography).

She includes some interesting info about Mozart. She doesn't believe in "natural" genius and points out that Mozart was schooled by his musician father from an early age. Mozart's hands were deformed by the time he was 28 because of excessive practicing and writing with a quill pen. So although creativity and inspiration may be considered spontaneous or a special gift from the heavens, there is still a lot of hard work, preparation, and routine that goes along with it.