Craft

Althea Crome’s Miniature Sweaters Test the Limits of Traditional Knitting

Have you ever sent a knit sweater through a dryer cycle and returned to find it a fraction of the size it once was? Well, think even smaller. Althea Crome’s incredibly detailed miniature sweaters didn’t shrink in a dryer but were instead created stitch by stitch with scrupulous dexterity over hundreds of hours.

The Indiana-based fiber artist began knitting in college and refined her skills by frequenting knitting shops. Crome was eager to learn new methods, and like many who are part of knitting communities, the artist was happily welcomed with advice, knowledge, and guidance. Mastering one technique meant moving onto another, and when it came to constantly challenging herself, Crome always rose to the occasion.

As time went on, she eventually found herself in the throes of micro-knitting. For Crome, there was something particularly stimulating and liberating about knitting small. Designing tiny garments and being able to knit them relatively quickly provided instant gratification. As she continued to create increasingly small and detailed pieces, her practice began to evolve.

 

In comparison to the average knit sweater that holds about four to eight stitches per inch, Crome has achieved a gauge of more than 80 stitches per inch, meticulously entwining extremely fine silk in different hues. For “Nativity II,” the artist blended over 70 individual colors of thread to achieve detailed shading effects.

Crome is inspired by iconic works such as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” ancient Greek amphoras, and Warhol’s soup cans. Before starting each miniature garment, she first designs her own pattern, then she works underneath a high-powered magnifier, using minuscule knitting needles that she made herself from high-tensile-strength surgical steel.

“We’re always looking at other people’s art, trying to understand it,” Crome says. “Taking those images and working with a different medium, I just want to dig in further than my eyes. I want to dig in with my hands.” This way, the artist feels closer to the works that influence her, contemplating ideas for some time before testing new skills and bridging the gap between conceptual ideas and physical manifestation.

Find more of Crome’s work on her website.

 

 

Art Craft

Puppy Dog Eyes and Playful Paws: Misato Sano’s Wooden Sculptures Capture Canine Attitude

From pudgy pugs to a precisely groomed poodle to a deliriously happy Shiba Inu, Misato Sano’s waggish pups emerge from single blocks of wood. The artist (previously) chisels expectant eyes and goofy grins, revealing individual personalities that showcase each breed’s distinctive look and attitude.

Misato views our canine companions as mirrors of our own personalities, and she began making these sculptures as reflections of her own thoughts and emotions, from excitement to worry to longing. Each portrayal channels myriad ways dogs can be free and open in their expressions of devotion, passion, and play.

Her solo exhibition will open this October at Cyg Gallery in Morioka City, Iwate, Japan. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

 

 

Art

Childhood Boredom and Wonder Abound in Aron Wiesenfeld’s Inky Post-It Drawings

When a friend asked for a small drawing on a Post-It note to add to his growing collection of artworks on the iconic yellow square, Aron Wiesenfeld obliged. The North Carolina-based artist rendered one of his introspective scenes and enjoyed the process enough to create an entire series on the 3 x 3-inch canvas.

Wiesenfeld has since created dozens of drawings in black ink, translating the mystery and ennui of his paintings onto the scaled-down surface. In one work, an open dresser drawer reveals a toddler tucked inside, while another piece depicts a child listlessly watching a record turn. The artist rarely plans a drawing before putting ink to paper and challenges himself to capture the same depth, moods, and stories of his larger works with much more minimal tools. He shares:

It forces you to be very economical since you only have 10 to 20 lines to make a cloud or a field of grass.  I have so much respect for cartoonists who do that well, like R. Crumb or Edward Gorey…Because the drawings are so small, every movement of the hand is magnified when seen on a screen, and the lines seem more fluid or spontaneous than a larger drawing might be.

In October, Wiesenfeld will show some of his larger oil paintings at James Freeman Gallery in London. He periodically adds his Post-It drawings to his shop and plans to publish a book of the works later this year. Follow news about those releases on his Instagram.

 

Craft Design

Picking Up Pixels: Rüdiger Schlömer Designs Typefaces for Knitting

Rather than build the letter “A” or “R” through digital layers, Rüdiger Schlömer constructs the alphabet, numbers, and basic symbols stitch by stitch. The Zurich-based designer devised Typeknitting, a project that interlocks two distinctive creative forms into a methodically constructed, tactile hybrid. “Typographic knitting to me is a process of translation between two very different fields, hand knitting structures and type design. This is what makes it so interesting to me,” he shares.

Schlömer first melded the two practices when refashioning soccer scarves. He knitted team colors, phrases, and the occasional mascot into long wearables, a process that taught him to pair the mediums. He learned that “patchwork knitting works better for large-scale pixel designs or modular typography. Mosaic knitting has a lot in common with geometric Kufic calligraphy and works better for small letterforms and repeat patterns.”

From that came his first typeface, Knit Grotesk. Taking cues from the san-serif Futura, the design features squares that evoke a low-resolution pixelation and is made for slip stitches rather than the characteristic “v” of the basic knit stitch. Schlömer adds:

When developing a typeface for knitting, I constantly change in between analog and digital. This is important in order to not get stuck in the logic of either medium. Some details might look great on screen but turn out to be problematic or boring when knitted. It’s a kind of cross-medial prototyping between the screen and knitting needles.

Since publishing his first book Typographic Knitting, Schlömer has leaned into teaching and will lead workshops in May for Zurich’s Craft Week and another in July with the Berlin Letters Festival. He also released a pattern for the blue-and-white striped alphabet blanket above on Ravelry, inspiring several knitters to take on the project. “Knowing how much work this takes, this means a lot to me,” he says.

Next up is designing a typeface accessible to beginners who might be trying their hand at lettering or knitting for the first time. Keep an eye out for that release and news about upcoming workshops on Instagram. You also might enjoy these stitched CMYK studies.

 

Nature Science

A New Video Captures Mossy Corona in the Sun’s Atmosphere in Extraordinary Detail

A new video released by the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals the riotous activity of the sun’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. Taken by the Solar Orbiter in September, the footage captures a lush blanket of “coronal moss” met by bright arches, or the magnetic field lines that shoot from the interior. Researchers say the brightest regions reach a whopping one million degrees Celsius—the cooler spots appear darker because they absorb radiation—and the “fluffy” hair-like structures are made of charged plasma.

As the video illustrates, spires of gas, a.k.a. spicules, shoot up along the horizon and sometimes soar 10,000 kilometers high. High-density clumps of plasma known as cool coronal rain are gravitationally sucked back into the atmosphere. There’s also a “small eruption” that occurs in the center of the frame that’s anything but small: the burst of light is larger than the earth.

This mind-boggling shift in perspective is, of course, due to the distance of the spacecraft from the sun. Since the Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, it has continuously flown nearer to the star than any other instrument before it, reaching up to 42 million kilometers away. On this September mission, the orbiter was about 43 million kilometers away, which is about a third of the earth’s total distance from the sun.

 

Art

In an Emoji History of Art, ND Stevenson Playfully Recreates Iconic Paintings

More than 100 years after it was first exhibited, art historians still debate whether Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” submitted to the 1917 Armory Show in New York, was a wry joke or sly commentary on modern art—or both. That’s because the sculpture, a urinal the artist signed “R. Mutt,” was just a standard piece of plumbing. But Duchamp is also known to have coined the term “readymade,” in which he displayed objects like bicycle wheels or snow shovels as artworks unto themselves, posing the fundamental question that still thrills theorists: “But is it art?”

If Duchamp were around today to know what an emoji was, he’d probably love comic artist ND Stevenson’s take on “Fountain,” composed of a slew of what we might consider 21st-century digital readymades. A few years ago, the artist figured out that he could add countless icons to the standard Instagram stories template, resizing and rearranging them to create original compositions.

Starting with a basic background image, Stevenson adds numerous elements, like a fork standing in for a pitchfork in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” or an upside-down red exclamation point in place of a necktie in René Magritte’s “The Son of Man.” For Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” a bowl and a cloud provide the basis of the subject’s famous blue-and-white head wrap; a toilet stands in for Duchamp’s urinal; and numerous flowers, evil eyes, books, cheese, and urns make up the patterns of Klimt’s embracing figures in “The Kiss.”

It’s worth diving into Stevenson’s post for more emoji recreations.