Sleeveless?

It's Spring Break week here, which actually means I've been in studio more than average. It's much quieter and so much easier to work when all the facilities are open and no one else wants to use them.

Remember this sweater?


3am, about to leave for the night on Thursday, I was playing around with pieces on my desk, and I made this thing out of two sweater sleeves:





Maybe it was the early-morning tiredness, but I was really into the fact the I made something sleeveless with two sleeves. So I built on that idea. I wanted to add my own newly knit pieces to the bottom, but they needed to relate to the original piece in some way. I decided to try and play with the snowflake motif on the sweater that is a really typical fair-isle sweater motif. My initial ideas were way too literal:



Then, after a good chat with my friend and fellow Textile-r, Emily, and some much-needed dinner, I cranked out this muslin:

Look at those "awesome" photoshop skills (aka, the skirt part of this picture was not really black but it will be so I re-colored it). Ok, now time fore more photoshop!

I decided to add a gradient to the knit sleeves for several reasons. First, I had already experimented on them with ugly christmas colors, stupidly, and I had to hide that. Second, I thought it would be a good way to connect the old and new pieces as the patterning would disolve into black. The whole design in patterned off of triangular shapes, the most obvious one being the central one continuing the lines down from the sleeve.


And here is what happened when I dyed the knit sleeves. We don't have toxic-enough chemicals in our dye lab to dye a true black, so I unexpectedly just added a color to my otherwise black and white piece. Whatever, go with the flow has kind of been the name of the game with this project so far, so I am not so worried about it.