Marlene Huissoud

Marlene started out as a textiles designer. She works about with looking at insects. Her dad is a bee keeper so she gets a lot of her inspiration from him. 

She collects bee resin from her dads hives which she then gets a glass blower to make into vases or something, which is then adds details and marks to.

She is always very keep for the resin to look like where it came from. 

Some of the propolis she collected came from trees so she wanted to make them look like the trees where they had come from.

I could really relate to Marlene's work as my dad keeps bees and it is a constant inspiration for me to look at as bees as there is so much involved with bees and there is a lot of inspiration to get from them.

Structure

Lately within my knit work I've been wanting to get a 3D structural knit so i started trying knitting with elastic ( from having a lecture my Lauren McPherson) 

One of my first knits was just a normal knit where i put four rows of elastic every twenty rows and it gave it a nice ripple effect where the elastic was pulling the knitting in

I then went onto the double bed machine and did ripple stitch to try and get a more 3D ripple which i got but i also love the back of this fabric as it create a really nice grid effect, which goes well with my theme

I have also been trying out different amounts of rows with elastic and wool to see what effect i get and I've also been trying different colours of elastic to get a nice grid on the back of the fabric 

Dubied

With my current knitting i wanted to try and use the Dubied a bit more as some of the yarns i am using are quite fine which would be perfect for Dubied knitting as its fine gauge.

When i was on the Dubied i was trying out lots of different yarns and seeing what they did when knitted together, like wool and cotton and also bamboo.

I really liked the ripple stitch as it went really well with my fashion project of structure and it was the first 3D knit i had done which i was really happy with. 

The only thing with the Dubied is it very temperamental and it does just drop stitches and if my eye wasn't on it all the time i would miss the dropped stitches.

So i mainly used the Dubied to experiment and try out new yarns and new stitches and techniques and i also struggled as we only have one Dubied and was having to share it with another student so time available was limited 

Weaving

Recently we had a talk from Wallace and Sewell which was all about their weave company they run together. This encouraged me to try weaving one more time, as when i had done it before i had found it very frustrating to set up. 

But with that said i still really enjoy the process of the actual weaving process, so i thought i would give it one more go to see if i can bare the set up

Turns out i can't, but i still really enjoyed it and i love the fabric that i made in the end i just don't have the patience to do it, i would rather spend my time making something and then be able to go away with it when I've had enough and not have to keep on going with something i don't enjoy.

Digital Knitting

Lately at university I've been trying to get the brother kh- 950i to work which is a digital knitting machine after it not having a power cord to see if it actually works i went and got one and tried it and turns out it works then the struggle of not having any manuals for it or stitch pattern number i had to download them all to my phone and work from the books on my phone to get this machine to work. 

I then was really interested in getting it to be able to knit images i had taken or created so the answer to this was to get a cable that connected the knitting machine to a pc ( which the knitting machine would read as a floppy disc drive) 

David already had a cable which would connect it to a pc so we set it up and got designaknit running which is a programme where you can design your own patterns or make patterns from images. 

Unfortunately the knitting machine kept having an error when trying to send the pattern to the machine so we are still trying to get this to work. 

I then brought in my own laptop with another knit software on and it sent the pattern but then the machine wasn't reading it properly so again i am still working on getting this to work, but i am really interested in making it work as i feel it would have benefits for everyone interested in knit and it is something we could all use.