Monday, November 12, 2007

I'm Rooked

Rook

Well, technically, the name of this piece is The Warder....

I finally took the plunge to teach myself how to make monotypes for this project. Using watercolour pencils dry on a detergent-coated frosted mylar sheet, I did a rough sketch of a rook (although not my favourite berserker) from the Lewis Chessman publication put out by the British Museum.

No, it really isn't this colour -- it is, after all, a piece of carved walrus tusk -- but I wanted to see how the pencils would work to make a print, and I'm rather pleased with how it worked, particularly the gentle fuzziness of the image, as I wanted to avoid a photographic look.

Monday, November 5, 2007

The Spinning Begins

Yarn
The sample in the picture is my two-ply reference string, wrapped around my measuring gauge. The notch where it's resting is an inch long, for perspective.

I spent more than three hours on Friday spinning up a full bobbin like this -- I think I used a little more than a quarter of the wool that I've got, and I hope I've got enough to knit the chessboard the way I want.

But like most projects, I suspect this one will go through some tinkering.

This yarn, for example. There's a trade-off between spinning heavy and spinning thin: you get way more yardage from thin (for a given weight of spinning material), but you put in more time spinning and knitting fine. I need to balance the time I've got with the limited amount of wool, and that's going to require a lot of ongoing evaluation.