Making an exhibition piece

Mu Guild is having an exhibition and I'm excited. I don't understand what an exhibition is for and I'm still excited. They asked us to each submit an exhibition piece. They gave us 18 months notice and it was barely long enough for me.

I was a novice spinner, an average sort of knitter, I knew three crochet stitches, and I could recognise a rigid heddle loom when I saw one warped up. That was just about the extent of my fibre skills when this exhibition idea was thought up. I spent nearly 18 months biting my lip in a nervous way and wondering what the committee were expecting.

Several projects were designed, then failed the "do I have the skills to accomplish this?" test. You should have seen the beautiful Shetland lace shawl that existed only in my head. Likewise the Norwegian stranded knit jumper, a masterpiece of careful pattern-reading. Don't even ask about the Mona Flisa, a beautiful concept which I have no idea how to execute. So many ideas, so few actual hard skills.

I had to hand this over to a higher authority. At the tea table I asked for suggestions. My familiy chewed this over while chewing on sausages and chips.

"Why don't you weave a field of sheep?" asked my MWAS brightly. "You've got a loft full of fleeces. You could knit one sheep from each kind of fleece, then weave them a field to graze on. It could even be a game: guess which sheep was knitted from which fleece."

"Hmm...." I murmered. "That could work.....except I can't weave."

"I can!" he said confidently. "Who would know?"

Well, it grieved me to think that deception was the only was I was going to produce a piece for this exhibition, so I resolved to share the credit with him. Especially as it was his actual idea.

I got my fleeces out and looked hard at them. Stash organisation is not my strong point, so it took a little while to select ten fleeces that were different, and identifiable. There was Romney, there was Shetland, there was Herdwick and Leicester longwool, there was alpaca, there were a variety of downs types and a hybrid or two. I pulled out a few bags full and started to spin.

They seemed happy to spin up as worsted weight, so I was happy to let them. The downs fleeces asked to be long drawn from rolags, the long wool locks preferred being flicked and spun short draw from the butt end. I was not in the mood to argue with them. Once 2 plied,  washed, dried and caked (my eight year old was very helpful in this task), I was ready to knit sheep.

How do you knit a sheep? I have no idea. A search on Ravelry (www.ravelry.com) proved most helpful. It led me to this pattern on  www.landlust.de for a baby's blanket with a flock of sheep on it, which looked much like the project I had in mind.

Now, there were a couple of small problems with this pattern. First, it is for crochet, not knitting. My crochet skills are extremely basic, and I even had to go out and buy some crochet hooks. Second, there is a chart. I had seen crochet charts before but assumed they were some kind of black wizardry. Now I was going to have to learn to read and follow a chart. At least it was one chart, to be followed ten times over. I should get the hang of it eventually even by trial and error. Thirdly, the pattern is in German. I had to do some research to work out how to translate German crochet abbreviations into English crochet terms, then find tutorials to show me how to do these new stitches.

Still, it was for an exhibition piece, and after nearly 18 months of deliberation I decided that the point of an exhibition was to show off what you had learned. By crikey, if I learned nothing else from making this piece, I learned how to knit from a German crochet chart.

A stroke of luck then happened: a Guild member destashed a considerable amount of rug yarn in my direction. I was now very well served for different shades of green rug wool. My MWAS rifled through the sacks, picked out a few cones, and started to weave,

A fundamental lack of communication between us lead to a field rather smaller than the sheep actually needed to avoid charges of cruelty from the RSPCA. But time was ticking by, and I was in no mood to ask my MWAS to start again. I culled the flock to eight members, and sewed them in place.

Sheep pinned down and waiting for sewing

 

 

The committee approved my piece, and the flock will be going into the exhibition, with or without the "Which sheep is which?" quiz is undecided yet. I'm very pleased with it. If I were doing it again I would do it differently, and better, but that shows how much I learned from the process, which I guess is the point. After all, if exhibitions are just showing off the skills we had all along, the would be fairly dull affairs. Our exhibition will show a range of skill levels, from the novice spinner's first handspun socks to the expert weaver's expert weaving. And in the case of this piece, it is a showcase of my family's new and growing love of wool.