Stargate Shawl

Here is my second knitting project this month: a stargate shawl. This is my second entry in the Nerdwars competition on Ravelry. It had to be the colour of a stargate wormhole, which I think it is.

Plus, it had to tie into the show in some way, and I have made my shawl be the wave about to swamp the city in the Episode The Eye in series 1.

Umbilical hat

¨Umbilical hat¨ is a wierd name for this pattern. I whipped up the remnants of the wool from my Sedum jacket. This is a hat for one of the Nerdwars challenges on Ravelry. I used a totally different guage of wool, and once I had done the umbilical cord, I pretty much had to wing the remainder of the pattern.

Sketch of Lunenburg harbour

I probably won´t get a chance to paint it though. My son wants to color it in tomorrow. Done with a 0.05 technical pen, and is about an inch and a half high.

Sketch of cargo ship

A quick sketch of an cargo boat. It is meant to be a bit weird - a boat like that would never travel through such a passage. I was aiming for some sort of claustophobic futuristic feel - is the passage something natural or some man-made structure? I based it on my son´s wooden blocks and bath toy below.

Sketch of a cafe

I really liked a sketch I saw on Pete Scully´s blog recently, and thought I would try something in that style, of one of our local cafes. As usual, its not a patch on the original artist´s style. More practice required! Still its not a style I usually draw in and its nice to practice something different.

Map of paddling the Clutha River

I´ve just read Jill Berry´s amazing book Personal Geographies, and had a go at drawing a map of the first few days of our paddling trip down the Clutha River, from Lake Wanaka to the sea. This drawing is just a bit of a practice go, and before I knew it, my six year old had started colouring it in. But at least he let me choose some of the colours he used.

The book Personal Geographies is probably the only one on the topic of hand-drawn maps that I have found that approaches it from a journalling and crafter´s perspective. Other books like Strange Maps, or You are Here, which had very good reviews, I found very disappointing. They included some interesting material, but very few pictures of anything I thought ¨I´d like to do something like that¨.

Sketchbooks, journalling and being a SAHM

It always seems very difficult to keep up sketching while having very small children. I would love to do urban sketching, but my kids would have run a km away before I´d finished my sketch.

So for the moment I am sketching from photos. My son is quite interested in colouring in my sketches, and he will wait while I do it. I can hear a voice in my head saying ¨OK - you have 60 seconds - sketch!¨. Sixty seconds is the maximum amount of time a small child will probably wait for a picture to colour in. So this is great practice at developing the fast sketching and quick eye that I will probably need when I start sketching in the real world. Sometimes I only get half way through, but then he finishes off the sketch himself. I have fond memories of doing this with my own dad.

Also, and this is difficult: I let him colour in my pen and ink sketches in my sketchbook journal. This has been quite a leap - that´s my sketchbook, I think. But then I think, oh, get over yourself, you´re not Vincent Van Gogh or anything!

I did these two sketches below on site, which was a rare opportunity.