Bespoke By Brouhaha!

Serendipity at Sunset 21 October 2007

So, more than a year after the fact, I have finally made reality a long-standing design project idea of mine: to combine my two favourite crafts, knitting and mosaic!

I kinda like it!

Specs:

Materials:
- Super 10 cotton yarn: parts of 3 skeins
- 4.0 mm knitting needles and 4.0 mm crochet hook
- mosaic glass tile: black, baby’s breath and flame
- stained glass: gold, orange shades, opalised blue/green, opalised “oilslick”
- mirror
- sun and moon pieces from a disassembled mosaic piece
- 24″x36″ canvas
- tile adhesive
- grout and artist’s pigment in cadmium blue, burnt siena and cadmium red

Time Frame:
- central knitted piece completed over a year ago (design based on Tilting at Windmills by Pat Ashforth
- overall design, mosaic and assembly started 20th October 2007 and finished 21 October 2007 (approx. 8 hours in total)

Destination: living room wall


Notes:

- I very much enjoyed getting back to some mosaic work, which I am more creative at than with knitting, I think. The knitting, however, has taken up my creative energies for the past couple of years.

- The sun and moon pieces were originally part of one of those (annoying sounding, to me) windchimes. The remainder of the windchime is featured in my Four Seasons piece.

- The name is all I could come up with right now. The main colourway for the piece was inspired by the paprika colourway in the knitted piece, by and large. I decided to highlight the sun and moon parts in blue to differentiate them from the sunset theme overall.

- I am not 100% sold on the combination of knitting and mosaic as yet, at least with the Super 10 yarn. Should I endeavour another such piece I would probably go with a novelty yarn which would blend in better with the shininess of the glass and tile, I think. Overall, though, I like the piece and think the colours work well together.

- I tried to spray the knitted piece with some gloss spray epoxy for cleaning and to make it a bit glossy. However, not unpredictably, the epoxy got absorbed into the yarn for the most part – this had the pleasant side effect, however, of providing some rigidity to the knitted piece.

- If any of you attempt something like this yourself, I would suggest a harder backing than canvas to provide structure for the grouting. I ended up placing a sheet of PVC in the back because the grout was cracking a bit.

If anyone has a better name for this and wish to share it with me, I’m all virtual ears!