Vegetable Supreme

By now, the incredible amimono (a word that encompasses both knitting and crochet) vegetables of Japanese crafter Jung-Jung have been showing up on blogs and pins for months. As with the work of Kyoko Yoshikawa, these pieces take food knitting to an entirely new level: of skill, of delicacy, of what is possible to accomplish with a hook and needles and yarn. On the one hand, they're incredibly life-like. On the other, their lace-patterned leaves and variously-textured surfaces artfully translate life into sublimity.

Using DMC Cordonnet Special crochet threads in numbers 80-100, Jung-Jung, who tells me she cooks every day, seeks to make accessories of the common vegetables – radishes, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, lotus root – of her kitchen. She's entirely self-taught, and began to learn to crochet at the age of eleven.

"I want to express various things with knitting from now on," she says. And after vegetables will come "flowers of the field" - a series of events to greatly anticipate.

All photos courtesy of Jung-Jung

Oh, and did I mention - they're jewelry...

Knit What You Eat...

...the better to examine it. This is the underlying premise of the work of Swiss crafter Madame Tricot, who has been blogging her "knitted vintage butchery" for the past couple of months. "When you want to eat meat, you have to accept to see the dead animal which gave his life for you, without the packaging of the supermarket," she told me.

Honestly, hog's head never looked so un-upsetting. Perhaps this is a result of the obvious care Madame Tricot – who is a doctor in her non-knitting life – takes with her free-hand, life-size subjects, the result of what must be a love affair with meaty foodstuffs. Perhaps it's also helped along by the luxurious yarns she  uses: mohair, silk, alpaca, cashmere, and homespun. "I need a pleasant tasting material for my soul," she quips.

On a more serious explanatory note, "I learned in medical school to observe," says Madame (Docteur?) Tricot, a grandmother who has only lately begun to feel that expressing her more artistic side through these objects is not, somehow, shameful. "I think my knowledge of anatomy helped me to knit correct meat for my butchery, or to knit a lobster, or to knit a plant." A yarn shop called Novalana, in the town of Winterthur, will exhibit her work beginning on May 11.

Helen Pynor is known to crafters the world over as the artist who knit heart & lungs with diaphanous strands of human hair. This month, she's featured in London's Wellcome Collection exhibit, "Brains: The Mind as Matter." It's an exploration of many of the "strange and extreme things that have been done to the human brain in the name of science," according to the press release.

"Headache" (detail) by Helen Pynor, C-type photographic print on glass, 2008.
Photo courtesy of the artist and GV Art, London. 

Pynor's bright yet haunting piece features no knitting this time around, but rather, black cotton embroidery on fine silk fabric. The text reads: "Headache – press brown paper soaked in vinegar against the forehead" and is taken from an old home remedy Pynor discovered in an oral history archive at a library in Australia. 

"Headaches aren't something I'm prone to, otherwise I might have been tempted" to try the remedy, she maintains. It's possibly just as well that she hasn't, as "I've been told that some of the old remedies are no longer as effective due to contemporary ways of manufacturing things."

Anyone out there got a home remedy of their own for curing headaches they'd like to share? Knitting and embroidery, perhaps?

Death to Heroes

I can't argue that the work of Patricia Waller featured in ASTOUNDING KNITS was subtle, exactly. There was a crocodile massacring a toddler, after all. And an elf endowed with the cumbersome hindquarters of a snail. But "Broken Heroes," Waller's new show at Galerie Deschler in Berlin, presents a certain nauseous hilarity in the guise of homey crochet. As a collection, it's not surprising in comparison to her older work. It's just a wee bit...frappant, as the French would say.

Ernie from the iconic kid's classic Sesame Street is recast as a Bowery bum, replete with five o'clock shadow, empty bottle of booze, and a begging hat (although, for what it's worth, my pessimistic bet for complete degenerative breakdown would have been dour Bert).

"Ernie," 2011. Wool, cotton filling, fabrics, glass, crochet work, 100cm x 100cm x 80cm

Hello Kitty is caught in the throes of seppuku, spilling her cute guts all over her tidy pink dress. 

"Hello Kitty," 2011. Wool, styrofoam, plastics, crochet work,  65cm x 45cm x 60cm

And Spiderman has managed to tangle himself hopelessly in his own web. Frankly, I always thought this outcome was inevitable. 

"Spiderman," 2011. Wool, cotton filling, fabrics, crochet work.  90cm x 150cm x 200cm
All photos courtesy of Galerie Deschler.

The show's up through June 9, 2012.

Cool Splotch

By now, a year after publication, I am just plain cleaned out of ASTOUNDING KNITS. On the shelf in my office that's lined with extra author's copies to pass on to friends and colleagues, you'll spy not one bright pink-and-turqoise spine. And the reason is: my daughter's eight-year-old thug friends swiped them all. Okay, I sanctioned the swipage. And gladly, too. It's rare that the worlds of kids and books-intended-for-adults actually meet and merge. For whatever reason, AS wholly captivated a bunch of third graders.

One of their collective favorite entries was of Isabel Berglund's City of Stitches. A life-size knitted white tree held "viewers" in knitted sweater pockets inside its trunk, underneath a cloud of green knitted foliage. This past February, Berglund showed (at Specta gallery, in Copenhagen) a similarly compelling and befuddling knitted collage piece titled Floating Pearls:

Isabel Berglund's Floating Pearls (right), shown here with Borderland (left) by Signe Jaïs

"We are witnessing an object in the state of transition," says the gallery literature. Say two eight year olds hovering around my ear as I type this: "Whoa, it's a cocoon, a necklace and a splotch!" and "It's just cool!"

Saws Away!

You remember her from Astounding Knits as the Dutch sculptor who meticulously recreated bathroom fixtures in pink knitted wool. Several months ago, Desiree de Baar turned her attention to pink knitted chain saws, which she proceeded to hang in Sleenerzand Forest in Drenthe.

The knitting "worked a bit as a jacket," says de Baar, covering the hard, inner bodies of the Husqvarnas themselves since, "I needed them to be weather-proof."The project was an initiative by natuurkunst Drenthe. They collaborated with the forest and assisted in the woods. "Although the hanging (of steel cables, up to 10 meters high!) I did myself.  It was really [a show about] sharpening your sights through the forest, finding those trees and the view lines with the perspective of saws."

Astounding Felieke

Somewhere, somehow, I stumbled upon the work of Dutch jewelry sculptor Felieke van der Leest. I was working on KNITTING AROUND THE WORLD at the time, and decided to add her to the chapter on knitting in the Netherlands. Much to my chagrin, she was eventually cut by the editors in the final stages of manuscript prep, just as ASTOUNDING KNITS was going to press - and so too late to add her to that book, where she really belonged.

In an attempt to make it up to her, I wrote about her work for the winter issue of Twist Collective. And I'm writing about her here and now, in the hopes of spreading word of her incredible, whimsical creations among the general American populace. Some of the pieces shown here (an assortment of her newest work) contain knitted or crocheted components; some of them don't. For a wider assortment, visit Felieke at her website.

Beaver Family from Pencil Creek

Billy the Kids

Incognitos Anonymous

Gonzalez Brothers 

Peace Puffin

The End