Listening to Patterns

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I mentioned in my last post that I was going to be teaching a workshop at The Compound as part of A Curious Town Plays. Unfortunately there haven’t been enough sign-ups for that workshop to be viable but I thought you might like seeing what I’ve been up to anyway.

Do you remember Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1? It’s the project on which I worked with my good friend Muriel, and in which we made music you can knit. The project is both an eBook and has a home on Teachable, where videos show you how we developed our designs, and where essays and playlists give extra context for the songs we turned into knitting patterns.

We took the songs that had inspired John Arbon Textiles to make their Yarnadelic yarn range and made music box versions of those songs. This meant punching holes into special punch-cards, and then playing them through our componiums.

We then looked at the shapes and patterns of the music on the punch-cards and turned them into knitting motifs using a variety of techniques – big lace, double-knitting, beaded colourwork, stranded colourwork, magic yarn balls – to make music we could wear.

The image below, for instance, shows the bass lines for the songs Wondrous Place popularised by Billy Fury and Waltz by Fatima worked out on a punch-card; under that you can see the hat and mitts I designed that are decorated with these notes.

Read more about the designs we produced for Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 here: Wondrous Waltz, Woman in All the Blues, Beadism, Looking for a Stranded Harmonium and Shuffle Play Shawl.

Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 was a tremendous collaboration with Muriel and I’m so happy that we succeeded in our ambitious project to turn music into knitting motifs.

What I’ve been doing more recently, though, is taking knitting motifs, and seeing how they sound when they are played through the componium. The workshop I was meant to give this week was to be an opportunity for folks to bring your patterned knitwear, or pick motifs from my stitch-dictionaries, and play them through my music boxes.

In Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1, we sought to make knitting motifs based on music. In this project, I am making music based on knitting motifs.

Would you like to hear?

(The videos below are embedded on my blog).

This first design is from A Shetland Pattern Book; it was quite complex to translate for music box because it’s a very big and busy pattern!

This is from the same book, and is a smaller pattern that looks like a wave.

This pattern is my favourite so far – it’s a simple cross-shaped motif, and sounds different depending on where it is placed on the componium punch-card. I tried it in three different places, and love how the end result is kind of a tune that goes through three stages… but it’s just the same pattern, placed at different pitches each time.

Of course, I had to do a pattern from my own KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook! Anyone who has explored Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 on Teachable will note the similarity between the upper part of my Dandelion motif and the shape of the notes in both the versions of Music for a Found Harmonium produced by me and Muriel for Beadism and Looking For A Stranded Harmonium, respectively. Can you see the little curve of the notes, so similar in shape to the top of my Dandelion motif?

I’m hopefully going to exhibit this work at the Curious Town exhibition and have plans to develop it further in collaboration with my dear friend Lorna Hamilton Brown RCA MBE (who also contributed an amazing piece – Woman Blue – Elevate – to the Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 project) for this year’s Sono Electro festival; one way or another, even if I can’t knit anymore, I am finding ways to continue working with patterns and with sounds.

Yours in KNIT + SONIK Forever, Fx