Knitting with different materials

After doing research into artists that use knit with metallic materials or materials that could be used to make jewellery, I decided to try hand knitting with different metallic materials. Artists that I found interesting were Nora Fok who creates unusual nature inspired jewellery pieces. I like how fragile her pieces look, like they could be destroyed by a swish of a hand, like things in nature.

I also liked the work of Jurgen Eickhoff that I saw in a jewellery exhibit at Manchester Art Gallery. He uses silver and stainless steel wire with jewels. This piece had synthetic rubies, sapphires and zirconia in it.

I also liked pieces from Lawrence Steele's autumn/ winter 2000/01 collection. He decided to over print gold leaf onto some of his pieces that were knitted with camel hair. I like that the camel hair looks fluffy, making the cracked gold effect stand out more. I would like to try applying gold leaf over a piece of my knitting in the future.

The first material I tried knitting with was a small piece of wire I had found, because this was so thin it was hard to control as it was quite slippy, but once I had finished the piece it was nice to mould into different shapes.

I then wanted to try knitting with a thicker wire to see if it would be easier to knit with and if it would change how the knitted piece looks like. I found that it doesn't really change how the stitches look, they are both very similar. I was in more control of the wire but it was a bit stiff with the smaller stitches. As using bigger stitches was easier to use with this wire, you cant see much difference with my tension stripe I tried to create. This is easier to see in the close up photo. I enjoyed using this wire as I had a lot of control over it, I might use it again in the future.

I then wanted to try using different metallic materials that can be found around the house. I first tried using Christmas ribbon, this worked really effectively as its strong and the difference between the two sides, with one side shiny and the other matt added something more interesting to the piece. I started this piece by doing alternating two stitches knit and two stitches pearl, but this didn't look that interesting so I started to put wholes into it and taking stitches out so it looks like its deteriorating and falling apart. I liked the outcome of this piece and the flowing shape of it created by the rib effect of my alternating stitches.

I then decided I wanted to try using foil to knit with, so I first decided to rip a long strip of it off and squeeze it into a thick string shape. Because of how thin the foil was, when knitting it it broke a lot. So I then decided to use a whole roll of kitchen foil and squash the length into a thick string. I used this to create a large hand knitted piece. I thought this worked very effectively, I liked the surface of the metallic rough curves of the stitches. I would like to experiment more with larger materials.