I love bulky yarn, as it makes making things so much quicker, and it's pretty fun to work with as well. I have thought about doing this before, but the actual demo scarflet that is pictured has the most adorable color combinations.
Today, I was browsing around and found that there is a woman named Rachel John who has taken that concept to an amazing extreme: Extreme Knitting.
This technique uses 3-200 strands of yarn at the same time to create interesting color combinations and textures. In 2006 for the Southhill Park Unravel Textiles exhibition, she got 1,000 strands of yarn together to knit one large piece with a very thick strand of combined yarn!
It doesn't help that I love seeing a rainbow of colors and I'm a sucker for texture; so watching this video was just great.
Her main use of "extreme knitting" is for practical purposes, but making this huge sample as a piece of art is a wonderful way to emphasize the art into fiber art. Perhaps it's not as bad in other countries, but "crafting" is such a low-brow and hokey thing, and knitting and crocheting are terms associated with making things with googly eyes and rubber stamps. I think that there's a lot of art in making things with these organized, fancy knotting techniques, particularly since the majority of our apparel is made using such techniques.
Either way, this event wasn't the first time that knitting and crocheting was used in the name of "fine" art. There have been several exhibitions in many galleries and museums featuring fiber art, knitting and crocheting, and there are many artists out there, like a former co-worker of mine, Nicloa Vruwink, who has made several beautiful pieces of art from crochet, sometimes using cassette tape.
Knitting and crocheting isn't just for old ladies and afghans (not that there's anything wrong with old ladies, afghans, as well as googly eyes, painted balsa wood and rubber stamping, for that matter), and it would be interesting to explore what can be stitched up and with what.
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