Monday, November 06, 2006

Grass-roots knitting

The latest issue of Interweave Knits has a lot of content that is to be expected- a horrible man sweater, yet another annie modesitt sweater pattern (a yolk pullover to boot-referenced on the right), and lots of overly complex sweaters calling for way to many balls of unaffordable yarn. There are some redeeming points, a few manageable patterns, one gorgeous sweater (below on the left) that I will never make because of the aforementioned reasons, a pair of buffalo yarn socks and some interesting short articles relating to some grass-roots knitting issues.
The mother bear project is a Minnesota based organization that collects homemade (knit or crochet) bears and sends them to needy children in Africa. I'm thinking about purchasing this world war II pattern and contributing to the cause.
The next article I read was about was microRevolt which is an organization started by a woman in New York in protest of companies employing sweatshop labor. Her main project is a large nike blanket made up of donated 4x4 inch squares from knitters around the world. The blanket has made some tours, stopping at knitting circles and galleries. This site also has a program that will convert any GIF JPEG or PNG image into a knitting pattern (I think simple images would work best, but wouldn't it be cool to knit a friends face on something???).
There were a couple other notable links in this issue including an article on Japanese knitting
http://blogs.interweave.com/knits/
and London's Victoria & Albert Museum recently posted a knitting page on their site V&A Knitting
(FYI, this issue will be available in stores Nov 14)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

no way? that orange man sweater? it was horrible? i showed it to my man and he thought it might be okay. okay, so most man sweaters are vile.

ily said...

The neckline is horrible and it hangs on the model like a cape. It is reverse stockinette, which I love, but for me that is the only redeeming quality. And what's with the tshirt underneath???