Walsall Wonderland

I was looking over film posters that were for sale when I was at the cinema the other night, and noticed one by the name of Coraline. It looked interesting, from the poster, so I looked up the trailer on YouTube when I got home.

The film came out back in May, but apparently I missed it. You can take a look at the trailer here, and it does look very good. Sort of an evolution of Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, but with a more interesting storyline, the characters look and move better, and less dead things, which is a plus for me. Anyway, that video lead me onto this one, which is about Althea Crome who knits tiny little garments for the movie. She knits jumpers with yarn as thin as cotton, on needles as thin as pins, it’s just amazing.

Apparently, this lady has been doing this micro knitting thing for quite some time, it is an art, to her, and I am very much a fibre-art enthusiast, so I took a look around the Web to see if she had a website. Sure enough she has one, and her work is just so amazing. Her gallery of mittens and gloves alone makes my brain hurt, and these are all proper garments made miniature, not just the flat shape of mittens, but proper, wearable (should anything have hands that small), mittens and gloves. She’s even done miniature microknitting. I’m not kidding, these tiny jumpers are small enough that she has a picture of six of them along one finger. These things have approximately 80 stitches per inch… that’s just mind boggling.

Now onto the macroknitting… okay I just made that term up. But anyway, there are a few macroknitters out there, people who knit on a very large scale. For instance, Christien Meindertma knits with needles large enough to be curtain rods… I’m not kidding there, either. Here is a link to an article showing some of her work, though I don’t advise hitting her site, the rather idiotic decision was made in the case of her website that every link you click on brings up another little window… It’s horrid.

Another macroknitter is Rachel John, who did an art piece with 1000 strands of yarn, and needles about the width of your arm. There are some really amazing knitters out there, I love seeing where this craft is going! One of these days I’ll do an entry about the origins of knitting!

Okay so after all that complicated knittery, today’s knitting pattern has to be super easy… How about a big chunky scarf?