I've previously written about a knitter who made her own needles out of PVC pipes and duct tape, but another knitter has taken super-sized knitting to a level beyond even that. When Kait Brink, whose grandmother taught her to knit as a child and who organized a knitting club in her high school, was told to make a large scale version of an ordinary object for a woodworking class in university, she chose to make a large pair of hand laminated knitting needles out of pine planks. And then, of course, she wanted to use them. Even the bulkiest of commercially made yarn won't knit to a gauge large enough for size US228 knitting needles, so Brink makes her own yarn:
I like to take objects that are discarded or unwanted and make them into something desirable again. The blankets are all from The Salvation Army; in good condition but still less than perfect. I wanted to make a yarn that would match the scale of the pine needles I hand carved a few years ago. The blanket yarn is stuffed with all things pliable: newspaper, old or unusable bits of yarn, unused curtains, blankets, old dresses, craft scraps, plastic packaging, etc. Now all these materials are fused together to make a new object come to life.
This video shows Brink and an assistant (because her knitting needles are too heavy for one person to manage alone) knitting. Nine stitches and nine rows of garter stitch and about an hour of knitting that's more like gator wrestling than conventional knitting makes one very heavy blanket.
To learn more about Brink and her work (she also works in other mediums, such as watercolours), you can check out this article on GazetteNet.com, or visit Kait Brink's own web site.
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