In December last year, I announced a new knitting project of which I finally can show you the start here.
On my other page “Knits & that”, you have the forty travel squares which I finished last year and since then, I have been considering a new project and it came to me end of last year. Instead of getting inspiration from photos, I wanted to try and knit illustrations depicting the essentials of the books, which I am reading with my book club.
First, I needed to figure out the style of my new blanket. The one I used for my travel blanket was inspired by the great American Afghan, which I finished last summer, so it was straightforward to start there.
First book I read in the book club was “Monkey Grip” written in the 70’s by Helen Garner.
I wanted to depict the pool, where the characters always were, but also how love can be destroyed of drug abuse, so main ideas for the knitting would be water, syringes and a broken heart.
I already had the idea of water from the water & crab square of the American afghan, and then I wanted to knit a broken heart and a syringe in the sand. Here you have the result.
It turned out OK, but I found the final square a bit chunky and not delicate enough, plus I was after a different kind of design, so that this blanket would be different from my previous ones.
End of last year, Kate Davies and Felicity Ford, UK knit designers, published their articles and base pattern for their fantastic women’s collaborative blanket, with each square celebrating creative women - a fantastic work of colour with four equal parts to each square. That was the new way to go for my new blanket, and thus I knitted a new square for the “Monkey Grip”. So different from the first design, but still with the broken heart in the sand and syringes by the water. I am very happy with the result. What do you think?
We all create our own imaginations and illustrations in our head of the books we read, so I will be curious to see if you can recognize the books in my knitting.
