http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/98771454.html

This was an indoor/outdoor three-part art piece comprised of suspended stones of varying sizes (including some that were too big to hang safely in that particular location and had to be sorta strewn on the floor of the skyway), a lyric essay put on transparencies and mounted on the skyway windows behind the hanging stones, and the big boulder outside. It went up in Marchish, or something like that (April?), and by the time of the grassy/sunny/pleasant pictures at the end, the cover had been up for months (I took the suspended rocks down after about 6 weeks but wanted to see how the boulder cover might degrade if left for a more extended period of time). It was remarkably clean and a little bleached from the sun. There were holes in places, because I gather folks liked to climb up on it and sit on it (which is awesome). I washed it after bringing it home and sometimes use it for a weird, light blanket on the couch. It’s kind of like a giant, deflated fried egg.

The hanging stones were knit/encased ad lib, putting in short rows and decs and incs as needed to follow the shape of each stone. I made extensive drawings of sides and planes of the boulder, so that I would have a mental model to follow as I knit that piece. The whole thing was knit top down, starting with a single cast on row and knitting on both side of it…adding short rows and increases and decreases as it seemed necessary to follow the contours of the thing. By the time I was done I had every large or larger needle I had involved, one circular needle after another (like doing 2-needle socks, but with something more like 8 or 9 needles), which means the gauge is never really constant (but that’s part of what I like about it); I’d knit the stitches off a 32” US10 using a 24” US8 (for example), and then the US 10 would be free to move on to the next needle, which could have been anything from a 9 to a 17. Once it was deemed large enough (I never tested it - just guessed), I bound it off suuuuper loose, fit it to the boulder, and then spent 3 or 4 hours sewing it onto the boulder, weaving and whipping and darning the bottom edge to itself around the under contours of the rock, using a long casing/threading tool as a giant darning needle.

I was super proud of it. I loved the way it looked in the greyish spring weather when I put it on, and I loved the way it looked in the summer in the sun. Made me feel really good and a couple passersby stopped to tell me it made them feel good to look at it, too. Yellow will do that to you, yo.

That’s my friend Holly perching on it like a Siren, for scale.