Skeleton Troubleshooting, and More!

I've spent the majority of this week focused on student-y things (midterms!), but here's some stuff that happened:

The day after I put up the whale skeleton, I arrived at school to find that half of it had fallen down overnight.

Oops. Oh, dear.

So, I put it all back together, reinforced the attachment points, and got it back up there. And everything seemed to be fine...

But over the next couple of days, the spine seemed to be sagging more and more at the parts in between the three attachment points.

So for now, the best option seems to be to just make a few extra attachment points along the spine in between the existing ones. The skeleton is going to be covered in snow fencing (orange plastic mesh-y stuff) before the knitting goes on it, so that should offer a bit more support to the structure as well and prevent the bigger ribs from elongating.

In whale wool news, I'm in the process of dyeing the dark grey portion of the wool... it's been in the mordant since yesterday morning, so I plan to actually get it into the dye tomorrow or the day after. The wool did actually all fit into the container I had, but without tons of space to move around, so I've just been giving it frequent stirs.

Aaaannd, the teapot is just about finished! Here I am, trying to get the lid knit on before my midterm critique:

Hanging Up the Whale Skeleton

Major progress with the whale skeleton over the past few days!

Here I am way up on a ladder, setting up the ropes that the whale is going to hang from during the next few months:

And with that task finished, I could get to work on attaching the spines to the rib pieces.

I'm just using duct tape... it seems to be working out okay. 

A whale shape started to come together very quickly!

And then it was up! It comes out into the room quite a bit further than I had initially imagined it would. Everyone else who's seen it has said the same thing. It's hard to really grasp the scale of the project until it's been put together like this.

The plan for this week is to dye the remainder of the wool, fingers crossed that I can manage to get a consistent colour across all the skeins... it's going to be a challenge, I think.

I'm Also Knitting a Teapot

I'll have another whale update within the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here's another knitting project that I've been working on! It's a teapot.

I dyed all the wool for the teapot with natural dyes:

From left to right: indigo, cochineal and cream of tartar, lac, logwood

In addition to the colours in the picture above, I also used some undyed wool.

The teapot, although a relatively small and simple shape, was pretty exciting to knit. I designed the knitting pattern for it myself, which is something I've never done before (mostly, it was a lot of math). I also wanted my teapot to have a fair isle design going around the middle. Unable to decide whether I wanted the design to feature hearts or foxes, I chose both. Here's the design I came up with (it repeats once more, but the second time with two fox faces on top and one on bottom):

And here's some colour sampling that I did:

I spent about three days asking everyone I spoke to whether the preferred the red foxes or the purple-y foxes (I ended up going with the purple-y ones).

This is right after I finished knitting the base of the teapot:

And these two shots were taken as I started knitting the body:

That braid you can see is called a Latvian Braid, and it's a really lovely technique that's super easy to do. This was my first time trying it, but you'd probably see it most often on mitten cuffs.

The fox/heart design around the middle ended up taking much longer to knit than I thought it would, but finally, I finished, and blocked the teapot body.

I blocked it on a glass jar that I taped some layers of folded up newspaper onto so that it would be a little more teapot-shaped, and not just cylindrical.

Before I can knit the lid onto it, I need to knit the handle and spout, and stuff it. Here, I just threw a bit of stuffing in there to see how it would look (it looked pretty cute):

And here I am knitting the handle. I'm knitting the handle in the round, and then poking a bit of stuffing in it to keep it nice and circular, and then I'll run a piece of wire through it so that when it's sewn onto the teapot body, I can shape it into a nice teapot handle shape.

I'll post another picture of the teapot up when it's all finished. And, if any of you blog-readers think you might like to knit a teapot of your own, I'm intending to make my knitting pattern available on Ravelry! (After I finish knitting this teapot and making a couple adjustments to the pattern.)

Dyeing the Wool (Part II)

 After leaving the wool to mordant over the weekend, I came into school yesterday, ready to dye. So, I pulled all the wool out of the container, emptied it out, filled it back up with water, tossed the logwood extract and iron in there, and put the wool back in. I gave it all a good stir and was delighted to see it was turning a lovely light grey colour. Then I put the lid on the container and left it alone.

I went to check on it a few hours later, lifted up the lid, gave it all a stir, and pulled a skein out to have a look.

It was so purple.

Oh no.

So, I pulled all the wool back out again, dissolved more iron into some hot water, added it to the dyebath, gave it a good stir, put the wool back in, and hoped for the best.

Another few hours later, I went to check on it again. Fortunately, the wool was looking considerably more grey this time, however, it was also looking a little darker than I would have liked. While I had originally intended to leave it in the dyebath for a couple of days, I decided at that point that I really didn't want the colour to get any darker.

I removed all the wool, rinsed it, and hung it to dry. I spent at least two and a half hours getting it all rinsed... I'm definitely not looking forward to rinsing twice as much during the next batch!

I checked on it this morning and it was mostly dry. The colour, although it had lightened up a bit while it was drying, is definitely a bit darker than I wanted it to be, but I think if I make sure that I dye the remaining 2/3 of the wool a really dark grey, it should be fine. The only issue I have now is finding something large enough to dye the remaining wool in. The container I have is a perfect size for the 29 skeins that I dyed a light grey, but I don't think it'll be nearly large enough for twice as many!

Dyeing the Wool (Part I)

 There's a lot of wool. 89 skeins, to be exact (I thought that there were 83, but I did a re-count). Before any of it could be dyed, each skein had to be tied up so that it wouldn't get tangled. So, here's me tying up some wool:

And here's the wool after it had all been tied. The pile started off in the crate and then grew up onto and around the table.

Next step, scouring! This wool was particularly dirty, and I wanted to wash it really really well before I started the dyeing process, so I made the decision to scour it in pots on the stove. So, here's the first batch of wool being scoured (I could only fit about 1/4 of the wool at a time on the stove):

Each batch had to be on the stove for about an hour, so all said and done, the scouring took around five hours, as it took some time to get each batch switched over to the next one (those pots are heavy!). Once a batch of wool was finished being scoured, each skein had to be hung up, or laid out somewhere to dry. I mindfully chose an afternoon to be in the dye studio when I knew that no one else would need to use it, because I basically took over the space and had wool lying around everywhere.

Before the actual dyeing happens, the wool needs to be mordanted so that the dye will 'stick' to the wool. So after the scouring came the mordanting. Same sort of thing as the scouring process... the wool has to sit in the mordant on the stove for about an hour. It needs a little more room in the pot at this point though, so I had to cut down on the number of skeins in each batch, meaning I'd now be up to five batches.

After a batch had been mordanted, I hung it up for a little while to cool down a bit, and then wrapped up the skeins in plastic wrap in bunches or three or four so that it wouldn't dry out before I could dye it.

I was about 1/3 of the way through the mordanting when my knitting instructor said "Alexe, I've been thinking, maybe we can figure out a way to dye your wool in a really big bucket without having it on the stove". Basically, 1/3 of my wool is going to be light grey, and 2/3 of it is going to be dark grey. Susan (knitting instructor) suggested that I go find a big garbage bin or something similar, fill it up with hot water and the mordant, and let the 1/3 of the wool (enough to dye the light grey portions) sit in there over the weekend. When it would come time to dye it, we'd do a similar thing... get the water going in there to be as hot as possible, and then instead of heating it on the stove, just let it sit for a long time. 

This was great news! Not only would it cut down on a lot of time (not necessarily overall dyeing time, but certainly time that I would have to actually be in the dye studio doing things), but it would ensure a consistent colour throughout all of the skeins, which was a big concern with the stovetop method. 

So, off to Canadian Tire to buy a huge container! This is what I ended up with:

It has a 55 gallon capacity and comfortably holds the 29 skeins of wool that I needed it to. So, I had it sitting by the sink this morning as I was filling it up with water... and more water... and more water... and then the wool... and then a little more water... and then it was full, and I went to move it into the back room where it would be out of the way while it sat there for the weekend...

Obviously, the thing was ridiculously heavy and wouldn't budge. So I guess it's just going to sit in the middle of the dye studio until Monday. Oops.

I did leave a nice note, though.

Whale Wool!

Some Non-Whale Stuff

 There hasn't been much progress on the whale over the past couple of days. Hopefully the anchor points for the pulley system will be installed tomorrow, which will mean that work on the skeleton can continue!

So, without an update on the whale, I thought I'd do a post about some other stuff that I've undertaken this term. In addition to knitting, I'm also majoring in weaving and print & dye. I majored in apparel construction last year, so a lot of my work is apparel-based.

One of my print and dye projects that's currently in the works is a dress that's going to be constructed from silk and dyed with natural dyes (I'm all about silk, wool, and natural dyes). It will probably end up looking something like this:

I wanted do dye the skirt using a resist technique called 'arashi'. I've never used this technique in a dress before, and I wasn't sure what colours I'd want to use, so the first step was to do some sampling. So, I took a couple pieces of silk and dyed each of them in a colour I thought I might want to use as the base colour for the fabric.

The piece on the left has been dyed with marigold and iron, and the piece on the right with cutch extract and iron.

Arashi is a technique that involves wrapping a piece of fabric around a pole, tightly wrapping string around that, and then scrunching the fabric up so there are pleats in it. When you top-dye it, the string and folds in the fabric resist the second dye colour.

Post-scrunching, ready to dye!

I decided that instead of just having two colours in my fabric, I wanted to have several. So instead of top-dying these samples by dipping the whole thing in a dye vat, I sprinkled a few different dyes in their dry form right onto the scrunched fabric.

Then I wrapped them all up in plastic wrap and let them sit overnight. The next day I steamed them to set the dyes. After rinsing and drying, this was the final result!

This was the sample I was happiest with... It's the one who's base colour was cutch and iron. For the actual piece of fabric I'll be using in the dress, I'll use the same dyes and techniques and try and recreate this sample as best I can. The nature of the arashi and sprinkle dye techniques means that I'll never be able to get it exactly the same, but I'm fairly confident that I'll end up with something I like.

Update!

 The ribs are done!

They're laid out here in order, with the tail end on the left, head on the right. They're not spaced three feet apart in this photo, so the total length show here is considerably less than 28 feet... however, I didn't have 28 feet of space available, and I wanted to see how they looked all lined up. You may also notice there's a tenth rib in this picture. I added an extra rib  1.5 feet before rib "A", which is halfway between A and where the tip of the whale's nose will be.

Also, I've discovered that I'm not particularly adept at taking panoramic shots with my phone camera. This was the best that I could manage after about 12 attempts.

In it's current state, the skeleton doesn't take up much space. The ribs can all stack neatly against one another and be leaned up against a wall. I'm anxious to get the spine parts of the skeleton underway, but once they've been attached to the ribs, I'm going to need a considerably larger storage space for the project. My teachers and I figured out that the best option would be to store it in a huge hammock-type sling that would have ropes attached to it and would run through hooks or pulleys on the ceiling - that way, the whale unit can be pulled up to the ceiling and out of the way while I'm not working on it, and then I can lower it down whenever I need to. 

So here's the drawing/design studio at my school:

And this the far side of the studio. The whale hammock will fit in between the wall and the lighting tracks. The room is 27 feet long, so I'll be able to fit the whole skeleton except the tail, which I'll need to make separately and attach at the very end. 

Some lovely people that work for the city of St. John's came into school the other day and installed some pulleys in the ceiling for me: (They're small, but there's two in this picture - one on the left side, and one on the right)

So all I need now before I can make a whale hammock is a few anchor points low on the wall with the door that I'll be able to tie the other end of the rope off onto.

And, in other news, my 25 lbs bale of wool arrived! It contained 93 skeins of wool, 10 of which went to a classmate of mine, so I am left with 83 skeins, which will hopefully be enough to knit a whale with. 

While I'm not ready to start the actual knitting quite yet, I'll have to dye all this wool before I can knit with it anyway. I've dyed plenty of wool before, but never this much at once, so I'm a bit nervous about that. 

The dye I'll be using is an exotic natural dye called logwood extract. Using iron as a mordant, it will give a lovely grey colour with purple-y sort of undertones.

Starting Construction

Before I can do the actual knitting for the whale, I have to construct the interior - what the knitting will actually be put onto.

The interior structure of the whale is going to be built out of 1/2 inch pex pipe. I'll construct it by making a series of "ribs"- circles of pex the will run the length of the whale's body at 3 foot intervals, which will be connected by a couple of "spines"- probably one along the top of the whale, and one along the belly. Possibly more if I need them for stabilization. 

I figured out the sizes for these ribs much the same way I did for the original girth circumference - measuring the girth at different points along the whale from a picture and doing some math to translate that to real whale size. So, with a rib occurring every three feet in my skeleton, I'll end up with nine ribs (the final rib at the end of the body is less than three feet away from the previous one). Here are the circumference measurements for each rib:

So first I cut the pex pieces to the right length using this handy pipe cutter that I borrowed from a friend. Using the pipe cutter is easier than I thought it would be - it cuts through the pex with no trouble at all.

Then, I've got these little metal connect-y bits that fit inside the pex, and I use those to connect the two ends together, making a circle.

It turned out that the connections were a little loose, so I ended up just putting a piece of tape around the join of each rib to ensure it doesn't come apart.

I've labeled each rib with both the size and the corresponding letter from my diagram (above).

And, as it turns out, whales are BIG. I guess I didn't really have a realistic idea in my head about how big 14 feet around is, but it's no small thing. 

Kerri with the 13 foot rib

Tracy holding the biggest ribs

Whale Math

Knitting a whale begins with math.

I've discovered that while it's very easy to find out the length of a whale, it's a bit more difficult to find other measurements, like the girth, for example. After spending a few hours searching the internet, I still hadn't found what I needed. What I did find, however, is that life-sized inflatable whales are kind of a big thing. So, I sent out a bunch of emails to people and organizations that seemed to possess life-sized inflatable minke whales, explaining what I was doing, and asking them if they happened to know the girth measurement of their whale. Mostly people just said no, but I did have one response back saying that while he could not recall the measurement, he had actually made the whale himself, and he remembered that he had originally found the measurements for his whale by just measuring images of minkes and doing some quick math.

So, that's what I did. I printed a bunch of pictures of minke whales, some drawn images, and some photographs. I specifically chose photos where the entire length of the whale was visible from the side, so that I wouldn't be dealing with any foreshortening. I measured the length of each of these whales, as well as the "height" at it's widest point. As you can see in the image below, I used these two numbers to create a length to height ratio, and found the average of all of these ratios. I then used that average, along with the pre-determined length of my whale (28 feet) to calculate my whale's height (aka diameter), which I could then use to find the circumference of the girth at it's largest point.

The calculated diameter for my whale is 4.74 feet across, with the circumference working out to be 14.88 feet around. 

About the Woolly Whale

I'm a textiles student in St. John's, Newfoundland. The current semester of the program I'm doing is one of self-directed study, culminating in a final body of work that will be on display at my graduate exhibition and fashion show.

Minke Whale

One of my major areas of study this year has been knitting, and for one of my term projects, I've decided to knit a life-sized Minke Whale. I'll be using this blog to share the process I'm using to create the whale, with progress updates along the way.

Here's a quick rundown on some basic details of the project:

The whale will be 28 feet long, from nose to tail, and three-dimensional. The whale's circumference at it's widest point will be about 15 feet around. The knitting itself will be done mostly on a knitting machine, with a few bits here and there being hand-knit. I'll be using a 2-ply, medium weight yarn made from 100% Atlantic Canadian wool. I'll be hand-dying the wool myself using natural dyes. The whale's interior structure will be largely constructed from pex pipe, in a ribs and spine-type form.