crafty inspiration and our first workshop making garden elements

The inspiration for our Great Gallery Garden in September, has come from a variety of sources. 

The Knitted Garden in Griffith, first piqued our interest as a wonderful, community project by a group called The Natty Knitters. They started with events such as World Wide Knit in Public Day and The ABC's Wrap with Love Knit - In, and as you see by the photos on their blog, they worked for months and months to eventually produce enough items to create their delightful Knitted Garden installed in the Griffith Regional Art Gallery, NSW.

Almost more impressive than the variety of pieces, were the number of participants - a staggering 138! Granted these included some of the administrative and installation asssistants, but even so - a large number, and indicative of the level of support and involvement required to pull off such an ambitious project. 

The Knitted Garden is now touring the nation...keep an eye out for it at your local regional gallery! These types of projects are so engaging, inclusive and exciting, they are springing up all over the place...like mushrooms!  Ephemera in The Mist in North Queensland, and Yarning Our Country at Gloucester, NSW are just two similar projects.

More generally, inspiration has been found at one of our local supply stores, the Woolshed@Manuka and on the many yarn-bombing websites, and creative spaces like Etsy and pinterest

this one from LunasCrafts (on Etsy)

and this one from GraceG2

eye popping installation ideas from pinterest, below

While the actual technicalities, logistics and design of the Great Gallery Garden installation continue to develop organically (ha!), we have gotten down to the serious business of the actual making. Our first workshop in making yarn flowers was held yesterday, hosted by Tuggeranong Arts Centre and lead by local knitter extraordinaire, Alexandra Davey from the Woolshed @ Manuka.

 

Here are some of the results -

and some of the delightful things arriving by post and in progress, from people making all over the country!

flowers at top, by Rosalin, webs below by Malinda.

An open knitting/crochet group will now meet at the Arts Centre on wednesday mornings 10am - 12 noon, to continue working towards the Great Gallery Garden. What a nice way to spend a few hours!