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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Knitted Armour?

When I was at the Fibre Forum in Geelong I was fascinated by some knitted necklaces that a couple of people were wearing, in a variety of colours and textures and lengths.  It turned out that they weren't I-cord (French knitting) as I thought they were, but simple narrow strips of stocking stitch which curled over on itself.  They had got the pattern from Dairing, a specialist yarn supplier in Melbourne - though 'recipe' would be a better word.  As it happened, Dairing were one of the suppliers selling stuff at the Forum and, although I had been told how to do it and variations that could be done and could have done it myself, I bought a kit from them containing several patterns, a cone of bronze metallic yarn, a cone of silver metallic yarn and a cone of  'yarn' that was a narrow ribbon of reflective tape (like the sort of thing you find on backpacks and cycling gear).

Basically you cast on 8 stitches and knit in stocking stitch until it is long enough for your purposes.  You can knit with one strand of yarn or as many as you wish - change needle sizes to make it tigh or loose, from necklace to necklace or within the same piece - use beads if you wish - and I'm sure there are LOTS more variations that I haven't explored yet. I've so far only used to yarns that came with the kit but I want to experiment with others now.


 This is actually a photo of the necklace below, but I used the flash and it really shows the reflective yarn!


This is the reflective and the silver yarn, heavily beaded with chunky bronze and silver coloured beads - they were actually a mixed bag of spacers.




This is both metallic yarns, knitted on two different sizes of needles to give textural differences between sections.


This is bronze with bronze bicorn beads.


This is all three yarns with the same spacer beads as a couple of pictures above.


And this is all three yarns together on big needles.

It proves to be VERY hard to photograph metallic yarns :(  Sorry that these don't show up very well.

They were fun to make.  I have a book to read called Betsy Beads : Confessions of a Left-Brained Knitter by Betsy Hershberg, which I bought before seeing the pieces at Geelong, which is about very similar things.  I even bought some knitting/crochet cotton and beads to go with them when I bought the book, and I am going to explore that now.

Oh yes, the post is called Knitted Armour because the other piece I have done, which isn't in this post, looks a bit like knitted chainmail.  It needs a chain applied to it which I haven't done yet, so I will photograph and post that one when it's done.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

The Painted Hills, Anna Creek, South Australia

I had never heard of the Painted Hills on the Anna Creek Station until July this year, when we took a scienic flight over them.  This is some official information about them:
Painted Hills 62

- See more at: http://www.wrightsair.com.au/more-information/anna-creek-painted-hills.aspx#sthash.SymDlFbh.dpuf

If you are ever in the area and have the opportunity, do take the scenic flight.  We did one that included flying over Lake Eyre as well - you can do individual flights that fly over one or the other, but the fully inclusive one is good value for money if you can afford it, and really breathtaking.

Thus followeth many pictures taken by me of the Painted Hills from the plane:
















Friday, November 01, 2013