Spent a very happy sunday assembling my tiny flock: one sheep, one lamb. Had no problems with the bottoms, but the heads did not turn out as well as expected.  I kept unpicking unsatisfactory ears and un-sheeplike noses, it drove me to distraction. I wanted a solution that would be both sheep-like and abstract (no pun intended). Did manage a creditable sheep in the end, which made me proud!

It was fun wrestling with problems of materiality again – going from line (one-dimensional) to plane (the knitted fabric) to 3-dimensional surface (the sheep). I could even say that, this being a community art project, the work has a fourth dimension: the stories of the people that were involved. Eveline from PLAY+ART made an exellent little film of this dimension, which I will display on this blog as soon as permission is granted.

Shown below are  the pieces needed for one sheep: two pieces of knitted fabric and three filler pieces. Developed a new way to fit pieces of knitting together, using a crochet needle and looping the end stitches of rows over each other.

Lessons learned:

Don’t use leftovers from T-shirts for filling, too heavvy and cumbersome

Bigger sheep flattens under the weight of the knit

Shaping of the heads done by crocheting

What looks like a sheep close up looks like a lump from a distance

Don’t specify the end result in such positive terms again – if I had give myself more leeway I could have turned my stuff into turtles and not let anyone down.