Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Before Birth


Must resist the urge to use the punnish, overdone "womb with a view" line...

If I can get a better picture of it tomorrow, I will post one. Right now, nothing I could do about how the flash caught the baby.

This turned out better than I'd hoped. It wasn't particularly easy. I made a conscious effort to be more abstract, more random than I am used to being with my sculpture projects. It's pretty much impossible for me to shut off my brain in the necessary fashion.

The womb itself is black worsted weight yarn, Caron's Simply Soft. I chose the color to illustrate the darkness inside the body. It is purposely lumpy and uneven. I was trying for an organic, random feel. (Again, that word. Random.)

To the left of the picture is the placenta. It's the same brand and type of yarn as the uterus itself. I have always particularly liked this colorway, as it gives a sort of brocade look. (I think the actual name is 'autumn brocade', but don't quote me on it.) I chose it because of that look, because I wanted to capture the richness of the placenta, to give it a beauty equal to its importance.

Next, the baby. It looks a lot better tucked into the womb than it did on the outside. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and all that...Pretty simple peanut shape, actually out of the same yellow baby yarn I made Smoochie's dress out of. Arms and legs both are a sort of curve, not articulated. Again, on purpose. There is a slip stitch of the same yarn along the edge of the umbilicus, from the baby to the placenta (the main part of the umbilical cord was made from the same yarn as the placenta), to indicate the exchange that goes on between baby and placenta.

The hooks I used...4mm, 3.75 mm, and even 3.5 mm. The placenta & baby were both done with the 3.5 (E) hook, and the placenta at least was a real pain (literally) to work with. The combo, especially, of the worsted weight yarn and E hook makes a very stiff fabric. The main stitch was, again, SC and variations of it, with some HDCs and long HDCs thrown in for flavor.

2 comments:

Francesca said...

This is one of the most marvellous bits of crochet I have ever seen, except possibly the vulva which I might like even more. I love your work. I might even learn to crochet now that I can see a future without afghans, although as a life-long knitter, there's some natural resistance there to only using one needle.

This reminds me almost uncomfortably of the days before giving birth the second time, when the mysterious expectation of the first time surrendered to the "I know exactly where my vulva is and what it is going to go through."

LadyLinoleum said...

Hey girlie, can add you to my sculpture post as a resource to look at???