Present Joys

CCAD students, 1950s. Those drawing horses and easels look eerily familiar, don’t they? And check out those smocks.

After I got my knitting machine, I practiced quite a bit. I made a sweater vest on it. Then I got distracted with other parts of my thesis and trailed off practicing. And now look at the calendar! It’s already march and I need to get my act together. Last week, I did some retail investigation into grading and sizing of commercial pullover-style garments. I combined my findings with my own notes about the pattern I want to create. At this point, I have a solid sweater pattern in sizes s, m, l, and xl.

Now that I have patterns, I’m ready to start making test garments. A few days ago, I called the people in South Bloomfield who will be spinning and dying yarn for me, and I made a small preliminary order—just enough yarn so I can create one sample sweater in each size.

I’m not anticipating a lot of trouble with the pattern, but it’s high time to have the final materials in my hands and to start making finished garments. Once I iron out any difficulties, I will essentially be ready to start producing en masse!

What’s next?

Speaking of en masse, I’m getting a little anxious about all the sweaters I need to make! While I’m not interested in making thousands of sweaters, I would like everyone who wants one to have one—and I don’t want to be running a sweatshop to get it all done. I really need to find a way to produce the knitted pieces I need offsite. When I go pick up this first batch of yarn, I’m going to ask Toia about outsourcing some of the machine-knitting work so I can produce more overall garments!

Day 82: thu, 6 mar 2014. La-Neka gives me some machine-knitting advice, despite dirty, broken-down equipment.

Day 81: mon, 3 mar 2014. Everybody wants to see cool things in Motion Graphics.

I’ve got a couple thousand photos from CCAD archives on my hard drive. They’ve been surprisingly easy to flip through, so I’ve looked at them all several times, tagging them in Bridge with lots of keywords and ratings. Besides the ones I’ve looked at, there are many more libraries of other old photos: architecture, student work, construction projects, etc. I could spend an eternity looking through everything.

But that’s totally distracting! My plan is to celebrate CCAD by making things. As of now, I’m planning to make a book. I don’t know if the book will ever actually get made, but I’m thinking about it in those terms. Ideally, I’d love to create a list luxurious coffee-table-style book that would be printed in a small edition and sold as a premium item. But I want to be fastidious about the quality of the printing, I know I don’t have time to oversee that. Instead of a physical book, I may opt for some kind of interactive website. Who knows at this point? Time is going by so quickly and I’m feeling stressed!

Leah and I made a list of people with a long history at the school who might be fun to talk to. Some of them I know but many I don’t! I love nothing more than to contact all of them and spend a lot of time in conversation about the way CCAD used to be. I’ll be working to track them down and schedule meetings soon.

What’s next?

Oh yeah, I’m making sweaters, too! I’ll be buying a small batch of yarn soon so I can get started with test garments. Beyond that, I still need to find a mentor. I’ve reached out to some people at Homage, because I think they’ll have some great wisdom about my concept.