Take the Time

I think a common misconception about my photography is that I make tutorials. Although these photo essays can be seen that way, that's not really my intention. What I'm doing is sharing my creative process in order to help you develop yours. Explicitly telling you step by step how to make something doesn't really help you do that. And let's face it: creative people don't really need to be told how to do anything. They just need to see that it can be done.

I've had quite a few of these small drawstring bags over the years, but I didn't start really using them until I started knitting. These smaller sizes have come in handy the most since I tend to knit hats. They also come in handy when I need to make room in my backpack. I keep a lightweight jacket in there, and if I need the room, I can stuff it into one of these and clip it somewhere.



The basic design is based on common plastic bags which are banned here in San Jose. The bottom consists of an accordion fold that is sealed together on the sides so that it can open and stand upright. The rigidity of this recycled denim paired with the small size allows this bag to do that whether it is empty or full.



Once again I've used this natural white mercerized cotton recycled from a Façonnable sweater. This is the same thread I split down from a triple strand yarn, and used to make my apron and a tote bag. I've doubled it up to seal the drawstring tunnel, and along the side seams where all the structural strength is needed. The whip stitching was done in single strand to keep the edges as smooth and flush to the fabric as possible. I might add to them later. I like that visual variance between the single and double threading. Maybe that's something I can take into the next recycled denim project.



In the Internet Age, we don't need all that step-by-step. We don't need patterns that tell us what to do. Technical craftsmanship is fully searchable now. There's no reason to get hung up on that. Just focus on what you want to make, and just make it. That journey of figuring things out is part of your individual creative process. Take the time to embrace it.

Shear Alpha Five

In the previous version's blogpost on Shear Alpha (Four), I didn't really talk about this design, and how it has changed over the course of it's life. I think it's important to shed some light on that because it touches on some aspects of my creative process. A lot of knitters assume that because I design my own patterns, that there are downloadable versions of them out there, but there are not. I don't write knitting patterns, and I am not a knitwear designer. I am a designer. Knitting is just a medium in which I demonstrate my creative process.

With that being said, each hat represents a step forward in that process. Primary designations differentiate the shapes. Shear is the parallelogram. Secondary designations--denoted by NATO phonetic alphabet--refer to variations in stitch compositions that define the shapes, and clarifications to the structural mathematics. Tertiary designations track changes in yarn and color using a number. Every hat I have made represents an exploration of this process.



So let's talk about the Alphas. They essentially represent the bare-bones minimum of what a particular primary should look like. Shear's parallelogram shape is demonstrated with straightforward stitches and minimal deviation. There are also mathematical processes in there that need to be physically demonstrated. This physical manifestation of minimal, basic geometry helps me understand it better, and generates a design foundation in my mind. From this understanding I can follow it with the Bravos and Echos that have branched out into their own subprocesses over the years.

In contrast, the Foxtrots are very rare. They tend to deviate significantly from this Alpha foundation. There has only been one (pretty sure), designated Foxtrot Zero, and it was sold to a private buyer. It is in these late stages where all the improvisation really takes off, and I can put together such incomprehensible compositions, full of production phrases no one recognizes. Such preposterous improvisation could not exist without all the iterations of Shear before it. Maybe it could for somebody else, but I'm the only one living in my head.

Just me. So I guess the reason I don't write patterns is because this creative process is my own. I built it. And to write a pattern for one hat would be like telling you how to carve a wooden stick without telling you it was a rung of a ladder. I'm not interested in teaching others to copy my work. Being truly creative involves developing your own personal creative process.

Here's an in depth photo essay about the recycling of this yarn.
And here's the Etsy Shop Listing. (Item is now SOLD)
Oh, and here's a recap of my Instagram posts on Shear A5:

Delete Charlie

Sometimes when I start a project, I'll blurt out my idea just to get it out of my head, and into fruition. Sometimes it's spot on in one try, and other times I have to kill the first idea and try again. That's how the creative process works. In order to create a strong body of work, you have to learn to kill your babies, specifically the weak ones. But doing the work, making that first attempt at creating what you know might die is a necessary part of the process.

So the first idea was to knit three narrow bands of garter stitch, and then whip stitch them all together. This is still a pretty solid direction, but after working on it for months, I realized how much I hated the monotony. This first version of this project was the only knitting project I had going for a while, despite the fact that I needed to be knitting hats for my Etsy shop. I was calling it "Fragments" at the time, stupid name, really.

During this time, I was also learning how to weave on a rigid heddle loom that I purchased recently. I was torn. Do I jump into a full-blown weaving project so soon after having learned the most elementary basics of plain weave? Or do I continue to bang out weaving samples parroted from Jane Patrick's book? So boredom with my first idea, and an itch to weave a twelve foot warp lead to what this project turned out to be.



And what it turned out to be is an iteration of my stash-busting series, Delete. Being the third, it is designated Delete Charlie. If you're curious, here are Delete Alpha and Bravo. The twelve foot warp I just mentioned barely diminished, shrinking only six inches to a completed length of 11.5 feet (350.5 cm). The width relaxed down to about 11 in (28 cm).

I don't remember where I mentioned this, but I don't like little tiny scarves. I don't see the point. By tiny, I mean short. This is a very subjective term, I realize, but to me the term 'short scarf' refers to anything that is under five feet (152 cm) or so. I want to drown in it. If I neglect to wrap it around me enough times, I want to be penalized by having it scoop under my feet, and trip me. But this, of course is not that type of long scarf. It could have been, but it's not.

Since this is a circular scarf, the winding around has already been taken care of. I got the idea for this peculiar spiral construction from a bag I saw on SriThreads. I'm intrigued by diagonal geometry in general, and this bag has popped into my head (and my Pinterest feed) on a few occasions. The technique is pretty straight-forward, but the tricky part was determining a reasonable width for the resulting cylinder. In this case, the circumference is about 55 inches (140 cm). I achieved this by modifying the angle to a length that was half of that. It ended up being about 28 inches (71 cm) which is slightly longer to account for some shrinkage.



As far as the seaming goes, I attached selvedge loops to one another as if to introduce a new warp yarn. This created some interesting discrepancies where selvedges of alternated colors met stripe sections along the spiral seam. Because of the slight differences in yarn sizes, there were differing weft heights being joined together. This resulted in portions that looked like deflated balloons, or under-stuffed pillows. I remedied this with little armies of running stitches. It's reminiscent of English smocking, and Japanese sashiko, and the visual texture it created really brings the beauty of plain weave up (quite literally, I suppose) to another level.



I look back on the knitted thing that this piece could have been, and it's so boring in comparison, so ugly. That first idea had to die in order for this one to live. Being creative means having the ability to generate so many ideas that killing some of them is only natural. Additionally, it would be quite arrogant to presume that every idea is good enough to keep. Coming up with bad ideas is just as important as coming up with the good ones. It's all part of the process.



Here are the yarns I used: Brown, Grey, Black/Bronze, Red, and a very brief appearance of Orange.

Just Make

So that denim I showed you the other day was sitting around within my field of vision the past week because I wanted to sew something out if it.

I don't know what to call this, but I'm currently using it as a mouse pad. The physical parameters indicate that it's a bag. That's fine. If I feel like sliding a piece of paper into it with web passwords, then so be it. If I want to use it as a divider inside another bag, fine. There's no specified purpose for this object. Making it was far more interesting to me.




Measure, cut, iron, stitch. It's like a creative meditation.

Delete Bravo

As you may recall from the Alpha, "Delete" is a designation I've developed to essentially bust my stash. And if you know me well enough by now, you'd know that I'd never name a scarf something so obvious as "Stashbuster" or whatever because that would be stupid.

The names I give to my work have very specific origins. The hats are named after tools and processes in Adobe Illustrator. The scarves: Photoshop. The sweater I just finished was named after a command in InDesign. Of course, I follow these naming guidelines somewhat loosely, but it gives me a good foundation for the thought process. This is, after all, about design. None of this is about knitting.



I suppose it's worth knowing that this yarn came from the first sweater I ever recycled back into yarn. I never even took a picture of the original sweater. This was back in 2010 when I was first learning how to knit, and consequently learning the prices of modern yarn. That's when I saw the necessity of it. I remember being skeptical of the whole yarn recycling process, but the thought of spending time rather than money appealed to my good sense.



So here I am, busting stash. Half of it, anyway. Maybe I should just make another one. Delete Bravo is an improvisational knit. The only preparation I did was a general gauge swatch, and a few mathematical equations to govern the potential variety of stitch patterns. The stitch pattern repeats essentially duplicate themselves from two to four to eight, while the angular transitions divide the compositions into sections of sixteen and thirty-two: 2 4 8 16 32. The consistency of the math unifies all the visual elements quite well, with the eight stitch sections fitting puzzle-like atop pairs of four stitch repeats. I like how this turned out.

In The Hood

Prototyping usually means spending production time on things that I will never wear, or even want to wear, for that matter. I don't usually share these types of projects. There really isn't an end product. It's merely an opportunity to develop an understanding of various techniques. I don't even know what to call this. Is it a hood? Is it a helmet or a balaclava?

So the goal here was to examine the construction of a hood. In this particular instance, I've used a saddle shoulder technique. It seems appropriate enough for maintaining structure along the top, but in the process I noticed a discrepancy between the saddling strip and the side stitches.

The merging of vertical and horizontal stitches seems to personify the length and width difference inherent in the stockinette stitch. This is to say that a stockinette stitch is short and wide, and when you graft sections perpendicularly such as with a saddling technique, the side stitches flare out along the saddling. I wonder if a preparatory row of sequential decreases would even things out? The benefit of this type of hood is already quite visible. I like how rounded and bulbous it looks.

The brim edge is a series of picked-up stitches and held stitches re-joined in the round. As you can see, there are some decreases in there to combat the flaring, and tighten the opening slightly. This seems to work well in this particular situation, but I think something more variable is in order. Maybe a drawstring tunnel? I guess that's something to consider for the next prototype hood.

Process is the Product

With the completion of the new hat designs, I'm pretty much done with shop production. I might knit up some re-stock on a few pieces, but I might not. We'll see. After this season, no work will be available for sale, so if you wanted to buy, now is the time.

I've never liked using the term "one of a kind," but there are pieces that I've produced and sold that will never be made again. Others were of a limited run of two to five. That's the way recycled yarn lots work. I've recycled a lot of sweaters, and only once have I found the same sweater a second time. Once. Aside from the limited nature of recycled yarn, there's also the work itself to consider. A lot of hats I've sold were simply a pain in the ass to produce, and because of that will never be made again. Then the recycled yarn of the original piece will get used up, and the opportunity to duplicate will be gone. I guess the whole point of this long-winded paragraph is that good work is already "one of a kind," and that if the work is truly original, then using "one of a kind" as a selling point comes off to me as… I don't know… redundant?

My work has always been about design. Divide, Shear and Reflect (at their most basic) are shapes: the cross, the parallelogram and the diamond, respectively. Throughout each series, I have demonstrated that knitting technique diversifies the compositions of a single shape in some pretty cool ways. Each sequential variation within each series has utilized the space of it's designated shape uniquely, and I've organized them with NATO phonetic naming structures. It's all "Process." I produce tangible demonstrations of visual thinking. My work has never been about knitting. What I'm selling is my creative process.

Or at least I will be until I close my shop on December sixth. When will it be open again? I have no idea. Why am I closing? Because I want to do something else. I want to learn something new. I want to offer something other than hand knits. So in order to do that, I need to creatively explore. I need to go get lost in the wilderness or something. I need to evolve. And let's face it: the shop is just one aspect of my web presence. I'll still have this blog, my Facebook and Twitter, and all the rest. I'll never stop doing creative things, they just won't be for sale (for a while).

Shear Echo Zero

This is something I've been meaning to try, two things, actually. One is to extend the trefoil crown all the way down to the brim, and the other is an isolated parallelogram.

As the trefoil crown developed over the course of my work, I came to realize that it solved a lot of problems in terms of marking where the decreases would ultimately go. To take the concept further, I decided to define these parameters from the beginning: the brim. This effectively eliminated the need for stitch markers for this aspect of the work. It also increases the potential for design exploration by introducing this idea of intersection.



That's where that isolated parallelogram of garter stitch ribbing came from. By defining these three sections so succinctly, my instinct was to differentiate further. Why not? But since this was essentially a design prototype (hence the 'zero' designation), I wanted to explore these new elements in a very basic way. The garter stitch ribbing section only occurs on the side that is shown in these images. The other two sections were worked in 2x2 rib.

This yarn is a scratchy 100% wool that it seems no one ever seemed to want. The pieces I've done in this wool over the years have never been bought. Personally, I really like scratchy wool, at least for hats. When it's really cold, that prickly bite of wiry wool is a welcome sensation.

These prototypes help me to iron out the kinks, and see how new design elements translate to the actual production of the work. I can scrutinize this manifested idea, and see the potential iterations of Shear Echo. In fact, I started Echo One this morning while waiting for the proper window light to take these photos. It's red.

A Little Background

I've gotten a few questions lately about photography, specifically the white background material I use in my work-in-progress shots of knitting projects. So I wanted to show you what it looks like.

This large poster was used as part of the display windows in Aldo shoe stores around 2001 or so. At the time I was working there as a stock associate, and when the time came to throw these out, I asked if I could keep a few. What struck me about them was how resilient they were, at least in terms of color quality. And considering the amount of time I've had them, I'd say that assessment was accurate. The value of the colors hasn't diminished despite being exposed to direct sunlight while hung up on my walls over the years.

But the real prize is that the back of the poster has remained a perfect cool white. I'm guessing it has everything to do with the material that the images are printed on. It resembles the white plastic used for weight gain formula jugs, but it's much more brittle. In fact, you can see from these photos where I've cracked the left margin edge (the bottom edge in these photos). Yes this one is battle-scarred. Good thing I have another one.

When I started photographing my craft projects back in 2010, I dug these out and cleaned them off. They ended up being the perfect backgrounds not only because of the white values, but because the rigidity of the material produced seamless gradients of white. They've served as backgrounds for countless photographs in the past three years, from basil to beads, and of course knitting.

Not bad for something destined for a dumpster over ten years ago.

Web Content Strategy

This is a little info graphic I've been meaning to make for a while, not just to clarify for my own sake, but to show you guys how I strategize my online content. Pretty straight-forward, eh?

Creative/Process

In an effort to wrangle more control over my online content, I'm examining my blog post tags. This has given me a chance to look hard at the content of this blog, and see the bigger picture. From the start this has been a place for me to share what I'm up to creatively. Very rarely have I posted something on here that wasn't created by me. Original content.

So this process of tag analysis led me to delete a few tags, and create a few new ones. The two primary content types are 'Craft' and 'Creative.' As you can see they branch out into their own subcategories. Blog posts are tagged with the primary tag, then the secondary tag, then the tertiary tag where applicable.

Interestingly, I realized the tag 'Graphic Design' was unnecessary. I didn't need it. As a primary tag, 'Creative' covered everything better, and the secondary tags proved to be more accurate. I guess that was weird to me since this blog started as a graphic design blog. I dunno, whatever. I'll be dropping a few others eventually, too.

This post is tagged with a new secondary tag that I've added, 'Process.' I hope that by sharing creative process with you that you may find it helpful in understanding your own content. I'm not gonna act like I'm the king of content or anything, I'm really not. I suck actually which is why I'm doing this in the first place.

Restrained Clarity

Graphic design is all about the message. If you aren't saying anything, you're demonstrating nothing. If you have something to say, communicate it with eloquent clarity. Form it, nurture it, groom it, clarify it, and let it out.

I like the idea of having something there, behind the eyes, waiting to bust out, but restrained, waiting for the right moment. It's not about the release, it's about control.

Jerome Robbins nailed it with a stunning piece of choreography in West Side Story. After the loss if their leader, the Jets are off balance, confronted by fear, regret, anger and sorrow. On top of that, they have to deal with the cops. With so much raging inside, and so much riding on it outside, the best thing to do is "be cool."

Before the action, before the idea springs from your mind full blown into the world, just before it explodes, grab it. Pull it back. Then slowly let it go and examine it as it passes softly through you.