Knitted Flowers

My current focus is on knitting and crocheting flowers to make arrangements and individual display pieces with the view to knit all the flowers for my own wedding!

Here are a few examples on what I have been working on:

If you are interested in having a bespoke bouquet or pet you can message me or come and meet me in person on April the 2nd at the twickenham craft fare
https://www.facebook.com/TwickenhamCraftFairs/?fref=nf&pnref=story

Also Joining me at the craft fare is my very good friend Natalie who creats amazing origami greetings cards like this yummy cake one here:

So why not pop along and come and say hi to us!

knitted Louis

Recently I found a cat version of knitting patterns, and with that I created Louis.
Louis is owned by my oldest friend Natalie Bayley and I made her this tribute to her beloved cat for her birthday.

she sent me these pictures as reference:

not great for detail...
but I tried my best and here is what I came out with:

I'm not 100% happy on the proportions, but I am told that I got his markings pretty close.

Knitted Leo

For my Mums birthday I decided to make something really personal for her. So I made a knitted portrait of the family dog Leo.

Leo is a crossbreed we rescued as a puppy from the dogs trust. They said his mother was a golden retriever and they think his dad was a leonburger, a big mountain dog, and hense his name leo.
He is a big gentle giant with an amazing temprement, who loves swimming.
I found a book with some really good patterns in them. It had a golden retriever pattern which I thought was the closest match to leo's body type.
The hardest challenge was matching his colouring.

Here is how he turned out.

The Woollies

This is a project I worked on last year for a potential childrens book for Oxford University Press.
There would be a group of characters that used their knitting skills and imagination to help overcome obsticals and challenges.
I was given a brief for each character and asked to visualize them and make a model of 2 of them.

There were 4 Woollies all together:
Baby woollie
Sporty Woollie
Clever Woollie
and Creative/arty Woollie

heres what I came up with:

 

 We agreed that creative woollie looked too much like an old lady/ house wife, but the other 3 were greatly recieved.

So we decided to go ahead and make a model for Sporty and Clever Woollie.

I started with a polystyrene ball and wraped the wool round to get the ball of wool style effect.

Then using things like felt, buttons for eyes and sculpting their feet from sculpy I added little details.

 

 

Lend with care models

Here are some close up shots of the models I customised for the lend with care ad.

Surface Pattern Design

I have decided to embark on a personal project that will make me use existing skills and learn new ones.
I am in love with surface pattern design at the moment. I kind of wish I had taken it at uni because theirs was always my favourite part of the end of year degree show.
It seemed to encompass so many things, from wall paper to net curtains, their designs were inspired by things as varied as cityscapes and woodland nature.
I am currently inspired by fair ground art and more especially carousels.
Keeping in mind that I actually have a great dislike for horses in the real world, I find the beauty, colours and detail of the carved ones quite enchanting.
I have set my self a fictional brief:
I am an art worker for the awesome stationers Paperchase and they have commisioned me to design a set with the theme fair ground.
The set is to include:
a note book cover X2
a 2016 diary cover
a birthday greeting card.

I want to create a repeat pattern that can be used for the background, as well as art work that can be used on their own or as part of a bigger picture.
This will encourage me to get back to my roots with good old fashioned pencil and paper. Then it will stretch me to sharpen my digital skills which I have been neglecting recently.

My first stop was the library, I found a book on William Morris and thought he would be great inspiration for the repeat pattern I wanted to create. But there was no book for fair ground art, that was wishful thinking, I did however find a book about riding and pony care which will be great reffrence for drawing horses.

So my secound stop was Pinterest, a great resource for obscurer subjects and I have started a board for my project http://www.pinterest.com/myrainbow06/surface-pattern-merry-go-round/

Here is my first attempt at drawing a carousel horse:

My plan is to play with this with colour and techniques.
Watch this space for more updates.

Amazing Morph Update

On Wednesday 10th Dec I attended a talk at the Watershed in Bristol. It was a retrospect of the lipsync work made by Aardman 25 years ago. Weird because I'm 25 and it still looks as good today as it did back then, which is more than I can say about myself....
Anyway, I saw this as an opportunity to gift my knitted Morph to none other than Peter Lord himself, Co founder of Aardman Animations and creater Morph.
His reaction couldn't of been better, he even bought me a pint!
Peter shared a photo we had taken on twitter and a couple of pics of Morph and my work has been getting some major exposure from it, which is awesome. I am very greatful.
The night itself was a wonderful event and I got to catch up with my mentor Barry Purves which was lovely and I also made some new friends. I had seen all the films before on my Aardman classic DVD (which I originally had on VHS) but it was great to see them on the big screen.

Lendwithcare Christmas Animation 2014

Here is an advert for a really good cause.
I helped this project by customizing the little people.
I have worked with these puppets and Woodsfilm before you may recall on the vocality projects.
So they all looked basically identical when I received them and using milliput set about giving them all individual features, eg hair and bare feet.
I also created all of their costumes.
Check out the website to help the cause : http://www.lendwithcare.org/

Amazing Morph

In honor of the new Amazing Morph Episodes, out this month, from the iconic Aardman studios, I knitted a little Morph for myself,

 I gave him a full wire armature and even some bolts on his feet just incase I want to animate with him at a later date. I really enjoyed the challenges of this project like knitting a round shape for his head. I got an amazing responce when I tweeted these pics and it seems that Morph is as popular as ever.

Good luck to all that was involved, I cant wait to see the new episodes, im sure they'll be great,
 and Morph, good to have you back buddy!

DK Publishing Leopard Design

Thanks to the awesome people at Rumpus animation my work was scene by the equally wonderfully people of DK Publishing.
They were interested in commissioning  me to knit a couple of animals for the illustraions a new pre-school educational book.

The characters were an intellectual leopard, a fun creative monkey and a loving elephant.

We started with the leopard and I was asked to come up with a few designs based on a bit of refference material I was given. We talked about how we wanted to character to be quite toy like, cute and as original as possible. Here is what I came up with:

 I was playing with the proportions of the limbs and the length of the snout but we couldn't agree on what looked best.
I was sent a refference picture of some cat character designs from an artist they had found on google images. im sorry I cant tell who that person is because I dont know!
I didnt want to straight up copy this artists designs because thats not cool! So I drew over the designs to make the cat more leopard like and more original. The drawings with the round ears are my designs.

 At this point we were adding the proposed colours and I was still trying to make the character look like a toy. I was trying to discuss the joints and neck of the character but we couldn't come to a conclusion. So before I knitted anything I offered to show them a 3D felt mock up representation of the design of their choice which was this one at the top left of the pic below.

This was how it turned out:

 He has a wire armature inside to make him poseable. I designed the pattern myself which was the hardest part of the make.

 Unfortunately we still couldn't pin point what they were looking for so we drew a line under that project with a view to come back to it if they find a character design they all can agree on.
I guess thats the trouble with working with lots of creative people, we all have an idea of our own but its hard to merge them all together. I did learn alot about the whole design process from this project and got a chance to build on my sewing skills. I also used a bit of photoshop which is nice every once in a whille.

Barry Monkey and Rumpus Animation

For my next knitted project I was inspired by Rumpus Animation's mascot Barry Monkey. A cheeky blue and purple chappy with a long curly tail.

I found a book of knitting patterns for nursery rhymes and in it was a domed shape pattern for a haystack. Using that as a base for Barry's body shape, I started knitting accordingly. And Barry kept growing. I didn't realize quite how big it was going to turn out.

My technique for knitting 3D characters is to break the character down into shapes. Thinking in terms of flat panels for front and back, or one big shape that can wrap around, like a net for a geometric shape.

I think I got the blue the right colour but maybe should of used a lighter pink for his face. But all in all I am happy with the likeness. I used card covered in felt to make the hat and felt again for his waistcoat and face details.

To make his tail I stitched wire into it whilst sewing it up. I coiled it up inside the body to hold it in place and hopefully stop the wire from slipping out.

My favourite part of this project was taking Barry to his new home. I hand delivered him to the wonderful people at Rumpus. They were all so complimentary and gave me some really good feedback on my work. I know Barry will be well looked after.