if you're based in glorious melbourne, we're doing a knitting workshop at carlton library (part of the yarra melbourne regional library corporation). we're not planning on teaching how to knit, but more how to learn, where to learn, where to get yarn and materials from, different types of knitting, a run through the 160 odd books available via the library about knitting, useful websites, and a decent attempt at any questions that you throw our way. knitting novices are welcome.
the knitting workshop is happening wednesday 20 april at 6.30pm, 667 rathdowne street, north carlton. bookings essential - phone the library on 92033699.
maybe we're just suckered in by the styling, as it's a very lush book to page through... last minute knitted gifts is a very likely to be a gusset purchase. check 'em out.... gnit's angora booties - awwww.
thanks to reader aoife for letting us know about the crazy mini teapots and teacozies - cute!
on again at alice springs in june is beaniefest. if you're interested in going, there's a tour in planning from melbourne with bushaus.
the victorian handknitters guild is planning a bus trip on saturday april 16 to bendigo checking out various yarn places to finish up at the mecca that is bendigo woollen mills. check out the guild site for more info.
Craft Victoria’s annual Melbourne Scarf Festival is just around the corner, and it’s time to start preparing your entries for the Scarf Lane Market. The Market is a forest of hand-crafted scarves submitted by professional and amateur makers that fills our Flinders Lane gallery for four days.
Exploring the theme of True Colours, the Festival will represent a collective expression of Melbourne’s tribes and their colours. This is an exciting opportunity to delve into the city’s identity, in a visual and tactile way. We’re looking for hand-crafted scarves made using all materials and techniques that reflect Melbourne’s true colours. What are the tribes of Melbourne? How are they represented through colour?
• Alice Euphemia Award for Most Appropriately Outfitting an Urban Tribe
• Artisan Books Award for the Most Outrageous Scarf
• Beautiful Silks Award for the Best Nuno Felted Mixed Fibre Scarf
• Beautiful Silks Award for the Best Nuno Felted Silk Scarf
• Beautiful Silks Award for the Best Painting Technique on a Silk Scarf
• Beautiful Silks Award for the Best Use of Colour in a Silk Scarf
• Beautiful Silks Award for the Most Innovative Use of Silk in a Scarf
• Cleckheaton Award for the Best Australian Pure Wool Scarf
• Coussinet Award for the Most Visible Narrative in a Scarf
• Crumpler Design Award for the Most Inspired Use of Stripes in a Scarf
• Flinders Quarter City Library Award for the Scarf She Chose
• Flinders Quarter Collected Works Award for the Most Poetic Scarf
• Handweavers & Spinners Guild Award for the Best Use of Colour in a Hand-woven Scarf
• Handworks Award for the Best Use of Mixed Media in a Scarf
• Howard Nye P/L Award for the Hand-woven Scarf with the Most Flair (made) by a Student
• Jo Sharp Award for the Most Innovative Use of Rare Fibres in a Scarf
• The Knitter’s Workshop Award for the Most Original Use of Sporting Colours in a Handknitted Scarf
• Lisa G Award for the Most Funky and Fabulous Scarf Crocheted on 8mm hook or larger
• Lisa G Award for the Most Funky and Fabulous Scarf Knitted on 8mm needle or larger
• Nicola Cerini Award for the Most Innovative Repeat Pattern Printed or Woven into a Scarf
• Panda Award for the Best Use of Colour in a Knitted Scarf
• Patons Award for the Most Creative Knitted Scarf
• Shepherd Award for the Most Original Use of Colour in a Knitted Scarf Made by a Child 15-years or Under
• Vixen Australia Award for the Most Beautiful Scarf
The Flinders Quarter
City Library Award for:
The scarf she chose: ‘… scarves wispy as those dreams of surpassing sweetness that, as we wake and yearn to draw them after us, break and disintegrate like strands of cobweb. Blindly I pointed at—I didn’t dare touch—the most beautiful of the scarves…’
Quoted from ‘The Scarf’, Joyce Carol Oates, in Ploughshares, literary journal, Spring 1988
The Flinders Quarter
Collected Works Award for the Most Poetic Scarf
This Award is for a scarf inspired by one of the following quotations from Baudelaire:
From To a Madonna
“(…) from my Jealousy, O mortal queen,
I’ll weave a Mantle in barbaric style—
embroidered not with pearls but with my Tears!”
OR
From Against Her Levity
“In all that panoply of silks
the colours you parade
awaken in our poets’ minds
a giddy valse des fleurs—”
The above quotations are from Richard Howard’s translations from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (D. Codine, 1982).
Scarves submitted for this award will be hung at Collected Works bookshop,
Level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne.
The Scarf Lane Market will be even bigger and better this year. As well as the Market at our Flinders Lane gallery, there will be a seven-day exhibition of tribal scarves. In addition to scarves submitted for the Market, you are invited to submit a tribal scarf for exhibition. Exhibition scarves should tell a story about a tribe and its true colours. All scarves submitted to the Market and for exhibition will be available for purchase.
As in previous years, a range of prizes will reward outstanding scarves submitted to the Market.
Details about the submission of scarves to the Scarf Lane Market and tribal exhibition, Scarf Award guidelines and consignment information are provided in the Melbourne Scarf Festival Retail Kit.
To receive a Retail Kit, please register your interest by calling Craft Victoria on (03) 9650 7775 or emailing
Retail Kits will be sent to you at the end of March.
The Melbourne Scarf Festival runs from 30 June to 3 July, 2005.
yep, there's a new online australian/nz knitting mag on the boil - southern cross knitting, brainchild of sarah.
update - it's akira day and hot as blazes, so even if the skirt was done, there's no way we'd be wearing it.
working on the freaky skirt has got us thinking that there's a very fine line between something that's artfully couture and plain hideous. we'd love the finished thing to be along the lines of artfully couture, in the same way that ana's hats are (we dig the octopus).
when erin came over tonight to a feed (yes, we donna hayed with a spinach/ricotta/feta number, which like everything donna, owes its life to styling), the skirt as cape trick went down stone cold - as in "you remind me of one of those crazy knitter old ladies".
it's not like we love the cape idea. both capes and ponchos just seem wrong - a recent magazine with the heading "poncho power!" drove home how much we truly reckon something is wrong with the whole poncho concept, backed up by blogdogblog's imploring "make sense, not ponchos". however a cape, particularly a heavy one, has a heck of a lot more stability than a skirt - it won't droop as much, if a cape falls off or has a couple of gaps in it - no big deal - moreso however for the skirt. hmmm.
we'll just keep on keeping on, hopefully with the akira deadline in mind (fashion designer and mentor of sorts to knitwear designer lorinda grant is doing a talk, and we thought it would be fun to wear something a little different, hence the skirt, if we ever get the thing finished...)
thing is, even if we were to shell out the odd US$600 or so for an ana voog original, we'd probably try the hat on, think we looked like a total nutcase and it'd rarely ever see the light of day again.
it takes (guts? creativity? some sort of weird political statement?) something profound that we're not sure that we have.
the refused (a swedish punk band who have broken up, but the video for (amazonian linkage to cd and free song download) "new noise" has been requested a couple of times by visiting rockers programming ABC music video tv rage) got me thinking about fashion with their liner notes to "the shape of punk to come" - "like the rebellious swing kinds of the 40's or the crazy jazz heads of the 50's to the stylish mods of the 60's we all need to recognise that style in contradiction to fashion is necessary to challenge the conservatism of the youth cultures placed upon us. strict in our style but with a touch of elegance and freedom and individualism." (another aside in a list of many - it's not just us who thought the singer was a tad easy on the eye - readers of swedish elle magazine voted him in as sexiest man).
tampon cosies get a look in at felieke van der leest, while there's teapot cosies of the likes that we've never seen before at the whimsical and groovy donna wilson.