What I've been knitting

My knitting has progressed - fortunately otherwise I'd be a rubbish student.

Last week I talked with my tutors about my lack of mood board so over the weekend I played with some of my images on photoshop. I've found this a really good way of breaking the colours down and find the subtle colours within a subject. This is one of the images I generated.

I was discussing this with DT on Tuesday and she was really pleased with the shades and the reasoning behind my choices. I then went and bought some material which I made into ribbons and knitted. I find this a really useful technique to allow different textures and colours play with and against each other.

At the same time DT and I discussed the idea of knitting codes into my piece. She was keen on me knitting a phrase into a a sample and then giving it to my other tutor, Fee, to decipher. I really liked this as a concept but realised that the code would have to be really simple so that I wouldn't have lots of different stitches and end up with a confused looking item. Yesterday, it occurred to me that Morse Code would be ideal for what I needed. Effectively I'd only need three stitches - 1 for the dots, 1 for the dashes and one for the spaces/background.

I found a copy of Morse Code on the interweb and set about designing my phrase. First I knitted it with two different colours but I didn't like it so much. It may have been the colours I used but I felt that it looked too busy.

Then I remembered the conversation with Fee, who reminded me that the piece had to be desirable. Ultimately I want someone to look at it and say "I want to own that" and I couldn't honestly say I felt that way about my coloured piece. So I had a rethink and realised it may work if I made the dots and dashes more literal. So the dots became holes, dashes became purl and the spaces and background became knit stitch and the whole thing became a lace pattern.

I'm really happy with this. It's not obviously Morse Code and I don't think it can be read as such but I think I may be on to something with this.

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