WWW: What Color Is It? Puppy Recovering; Knitting as a Luxury?

A happy ending to a very scary story: a 17-week old puppy is recovering after a knitting needle pierced her heart. She fell onto the needle at her home in Durham, N.C., this past New Year’s Eve. Vets were able to remove it, and she is expected to make a full recovery, poor little mite.

Just watch it. Mesmerizing.

Love this. Absolutely LOVE IT. A website that displays the color of the time. It translates the current time – a 24 hour clock, with seconds – to a hexadecimal code, which represents a color.

Interesting: a writer in Detroit laments the lack of yarn shops in Detroit, and kicks off an interesting discussion about the role of LYSs, the cost of yarn and whether knitting has become a hobby only for those with a certain amount of disposable income. There’s no right or wrong answer here, and I believe it’s an interesting and important point. Although you can save money by making your clothes, that’s become less of a factor. Part of that is to do with the costs of yarn and the interests and attitudes of knitters, but it’s also partially driven, I think, by the proliferation of very inexpensive clothes. Most new knitters, I believe, approach knitting as more of a ‘decorative’ rather than ‘practical’ art. I don’t ‘need” to knit in the way that my grandmother did. She was clothing her family; I’m using knitting as a creative outlet. And as such, I’m willing (and able) to spend more money on my yarn. But there are knitters out there who, for a variety of very valid reasons, can’t spend a lot of money on yarn, and there are fewer shops that are serving them.

Freddie Patmore of UK Magazine Women’s Weekly brings knitter Lisa Woodroof’s (of the Facebook group Addicted to Sock Knitting) New Year Resolution to our attention:

Just came across a lady on facebook who has bagged up a sock yarn for to #knit a pair each month in 2015. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/3l30UsxqPw

— Freddie Patmore (@Freddiebj) January 6, 2015

Mr. Meech’s computer-generated, machine-knitted portraits.

Video artist Sam Meech has incorporated a knitting machine into his work, exploring the combination of digital and analog technologies. He displayed his worked recently as part of a workshop at Milton Keynes Library in the U.K., and you can reach more about his research and work at knitting.smeech.co.uk. The artist, who had previously worked only with video and film, says that when he first encountered a knitting machine, he was “struck by the parallels between punchcards and film reels, stitches and pixels, and began to relate to it in terms of digital imaging as much as textiles.”