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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

In the summer of 2003 Steve was still working at the same job and I had been in school almost every day of the year, except for the days when I was working elsewhere. It had been a demanding time as I had been teaching groups of Special Needs pupils while their regular teacher recovered from a serious injury. These children needed the continuity of having one teacher and I felt obliged to be there whenever possible. It was hard but it had given me plenty of opportunities to use our creations. We came to the conclusion that we were taking on far too many commitments and reluctantly decided to take a year out from almost everything that involved travelling. There would be no big exhibition at G-Mex, no Easter Conference and very few talks and workshops.

As things turned out it was a timely decision. It is hard to differentiate between cause and effect but during the following year I had a series of illnesses and infections, including septic arthritis of the hand, shingles, gout, and leg ulcers, to name but a few.  I have always believed that, if I don’t give in, nasty things won’t get me. Were these ailments the result of saying we would take it easy for a year (Not counting the continuing renovation of the house.) None were totally debilitating but would have been enough to stop us fulfilling some commitments.

There were no big items made during that year but we did experiment with many new ideas – partly because it took the hand a long time to recover from an emergency operation. One batch of ideas was optical illusions to be used on a small scale on cushions and other items. They didn’t really work because the cushions distorted the shapes. However, this distortion did spawn another idea which came to be known as The Five Platonic Spheres.

Platonic Solids are shapes where all the faces are the same. There are only five of these. Three are made from equilateral triangles. These are regular tetrahedron, regular octahedron and regular icosahedron. The cube is made from squares and the regular dodecahedron is made from regular pentagons.

Making equilateral triangles, squares and regular pentagons is a reasonably simple task. The problems begin when the shapes are put together. The faces of solids should be flat with sharp edges and corners. This is perfectly possible with stiff paper, card and many other materials but not with knitting and crochet. As soon as stuffing is put inside the shape everything starts to deform. There are no corners and the faces are not flat. Every solid tries o form a sphere, some more successfully than others. They were fun to make but not what was intended. They would have been abandoned but for a surprise visit from Ben. He instantly recognised them for what they were meant to be and his first comment was “Platonic spheres!” Their future was ensured. This name summed up all that they were intended to be and the reality of the completed solids.

During the period when one hand was out of action, I turned the other hand to fabric printing. Screen-printing  is really Steve’s first love in the textile field and something I hadn’t really been interested in before. I suspect this was probably because I wouldn’t have been able to do it. It requires a steady hand and constant pressure on the screen. I helped with designs but never with the actual printing.

I couldn’t do screen-prints but I could do block prints.  It was fun trying to represent ideas we had used before in a completely new way. I was able to cope doing much of the printing with my left hand.

I particularly enjoyed turning coded messages into prints. To the uninitiated they are ‘just’ works of art but for those who know there is more to be discovered they take on a different meaning.

We acquired a second web site at this time - mentalblocks.co.uk. The internet had progressed yet again. When woollythoughts.com came into being there was very little option other than  dot com. Now there are many other variations, many of them relating to the country of origin of the web site.

The web site doesn’t show the prints to their best advantage but it’s just one of those things that stays on the sidelines and we should really make more effort to display them properly. A few more hours in every day might help.

Click here to see more about Platonic Spheres

25a. ADDING MORE STRANDS