The Philosophy

It's been a little while since my last installation. This is something I must apologise for first. I haven't lost interest; it's the weather. In the last week or so, we've had the most horrendous weather around and so I've been here at the house knitting up a storm every night to get some new designs onto the trees out there into the Logan City area.

There have been other problems that I'm looking into as well. The tags are either being ripped off my work (as you may have noticed in one of the posts) or they aren't lasting all that long. So, I'm thinking of getting them professionally printed up at a place not far from where I live and using a piece of leather as an anchor. I won't tie it to the work, however, as it'll be ripped off again and cause major damage to the work and I'll be back at square one. Instead, I'm thinking of tying it to the branch or trunk complete so that it will look good, but it also won't damage the knitted stitches. What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know. I know a person who does leather-works and I'll see if I can offcuts of leather strips that don't necessarily match the work, but will work well in the weather.

I can imagine that you're probably wondering why I'm bothering to attaching flat swatches of knitted work when I could probably follow a pattern and make a jumper or a scarf. Well, you see, I love trees and we - as humans - love to destroy them. So, I think that if we can make them look as beautiful as we can without attaching anything artificial, they'll stay where they are for as long as possible. Trees are our life source. They suck up the carbon dioxide and push out oxygen into the atmosphere. They are homes for birds, spiders and all kinds of insects and critters. But we don't see to really care about that and destroy their homes. Koalas have been losing out for a long time and it's only recently that we've actually noticed how quickly they are in decline; especially in their health. So, my philosophy behind my public art is to love the beauty of trees a much as we can for as long as we can. I use my knitting and wool to try to be kind to them and only attach my art to fully matured trees and not saplings so that they are not restricted. So, there you are. The philosophy behind the art. Until my next installation, happy knitting!