Knitting Topography
A few years ago, I knit a blanket with all the yarn that I had accumulated from other projects, received as gifts but didn’t know how to use, or gotten from working at the dye studio. It ended up being an unintentionally weighted blanket and perfectly sized for covering your lap on the couch. It also was immediately claimed by the four-legged members of the house.
The knitting itself was pretty straightforward. It was a good meditative project and I love the result. Because the blanket ended up so thick, it falls in really satisfying waves and feels like rolling hills. Every time you set it down, it feels like you’ve made a different landscape.
Since making that , I’ve been playing around with making more landscapes out of knitting. Messing with the tension and the number of stitches creates hills and valleys. Different colors merge into one another and denote different materials.
The best part of the blanket project was arranging all the yarn into the most satisfying gradient.
Most of the landscapes I’ve been knitting have been made up, but I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from neolithic monuments and their site maps. There’s something about trying to recreate the feel of those stones in such a different medium. This project is still very much in the early stages, but I am really enjoying it (and I have amassed a lot more scrap yarn to work through since making that first blanket!).
