knitting in public

pinteresting: pinning with pinterest.

ms.gusset — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 09:04:56 +0000

it’s been interesting to see the general reaction to pinterest – one of the fastest growing websites, which has also been a huge timesuck here at chez gusset.
we thought would be useful to those receiving their TON OF WOOL soon, who weren’t sure what to create, and in need of a little curated inspiration, so we pinned over 100 patterns. exactly how useful that pinning will be, time will tell. it’s certainly found us a few more followers, and perhaps helped to spread the word about the cormo wool we’ve developed, so that’s always a plus.

our board on pinterest

the issue of copyright has come up though, which has lead to some engaging and thought provoking discussion such as from professional photographer ddk portraits who got a call from pinterest founder ben silberman. we reckon it’s smart that pinterest have taken the liberty of producing code to prevent pinning with a ‘nopin’ tag which flickr.com has already implemented – so that anyone choosing not to share their photos isn’t automagically pinned.

we’ve found it awesome and inspirational to follow knitting designers, yarn dyers, and people with intriguing tastes just to get a new lease on creative thought. it’s also fun to search for artists and fabric designers to get a beautiful selection of their work and portraits of the artist. case in point: vera neumann
it begs the question – where will pinterest be in 5 years time?

charles bradley – your last chance melbourne!

ms.gusset — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:39:41 +0000

yup, melbourne’s last chance for a life changing experience with charles bradley is happening tonight at the corner hotel, and unbelievably, there’s still tickets available, so get in fast, peoples!

charles bradley

the inspirational story of charles bradley: at the age of 62, his 48 year dream of recording his own music finally came true with the release of his debut album “no time for dreaming”. before then, he’d dealt with homelessness, severe health problems, and jobs such as a 9 year stint at a new york mental health facility cooking 3,500 meals a day. find out more at beat magazine.

there’s a charles bradley documentary, and witness his lurve at golden plains festival where he hugs the crowd. we’ve got somethin’ special here.

on gardening & growth.

ms.gusset — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:28:44 +0000

it’s one of those weird days where so much and so little has happened. so we’re taking it a tad slow today, letting the pictures do the talking:

cilantro::coriander

geranium bounty from our balcony

gusset guide: the cafes of north melbourne (aka glorious north melbs)

ms.gusset — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:19:14 +0000

jilted into action by bryony cole’s post about cafes of melbourne, we have a confession to make about north melbs cafes: so many cafes, so little time and money. when we strike it rich, at least for the first week of flushness we’ll just do a sort of rolling degustation with our laptop first thing in the morning until after afternoon tea, and then throw ourselves into compensatory exercise and a cup of tea for dinner. here’s our rundown of places you just might like to visit in the hood:

auction rooms: voted by the age coffee army as THE place to go in ALL of melbourne for a coffee. (not just north melbourne…and that’s a hell of a lot of cafes and coffee drinking to get through, my friends…). we find it handy to go there for business type meetings when you need some wifi. longest opening hours of the bunch, and the largest place too.

beatrix: cute as a button. managed by muso evelyn aka pikelet, and off the beaten (ha!) track a little being the furthest down queensberry street. if you’re craving cake, they’ve got daily baked on the premises selections. bonus points: vintage egg beater collection.

fandango: it’s a little dream of ours that next time kelley deal is in town, we’ll take her out for a very late breakfast in the back courtyard with their beetroot eggs, pancakes, french toast and other assorted goodness while she downs a packet of smokes, knits a few bags and tells dirty stories. small and homely and lovely. don’t go a changin’. extremely worthy of the ace review at the breakfast blog (rip).

twenty & six: it’s all designy (note the bend in the glasses and how the coffee cups that you can’t get your finger through match the colour of the business cards) and fancypants (design books like grid systems are on display for your reading pleasure) and suchlike, but gee, we love this place. super friendly. killer coffee (and let it be known, we’ve spotted auction rooms staff in here on their days off – regulars!). if you’re lucky, you’ll find neighbouring black cat esmeralda out the back area on a sunny weekend looking for some lurve.

french quarter patisserie. almond croissant. that is all.

woolly bully: unfortunately, nothing to do with yarn. fortunately, everything to do with the song. comics. records. coffee. run by a NZ couple with a killer taste in music, we’re hoping that more of their little live music soirees happen soon. chats (ie the users) from australian music forum messandnoise probably responsible for bulk of goodwill. makes for a lovely lazy morning with the papers.

elceed: we haven’t even set foot in the place yet (see? so many cafes, so little time and money…) but by golly some of their menu items has had us wishing. any cafe with halloumi on the menu rocks in our book. some sweet breakfasty thinger with rhubarb. fresh juices. obviously we need to pay them a visit in the not too distant future and report back our findings.

do you have a favourite cafe in north melbs? care to share a superwonderful experience at one of ‘em?

we’re blogging everyday this month as part of Steve‘s little experiment to get us all blogging for 31 days in March. For more info, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #b03

pozible – who are the big promoters?

ms.gusset — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:04:43 +0000

we thought it was interesting that pozible had a post about their top promoters, and it got us wondering…who the heck are these people, and why are they the top promoters? so, we’re googling so you don’t have to. we’re also hoping that the following info is incredibly handy to people who are doing pozible – if these people below are the top promoters – perhaps some of them might be appropriate for you to contact?

we’ll publish the half baked cake now, and keep on editing/working on it. if you know these people and why they’re big promoters, comments are open! name link = persons profile on pozible, so you can get in touch & perhaps show them your pozible project.

Abbey Hunt – messaged, waiting on reply (M,WOR)
Alex Kelly
“I am a media maker and producer based in Alice Springs, Central Australia. Since 2004 I have worked with Big hART as Creative Producer of the award winning Ngapartji Ngapartji project as well as supporting Radio Holiday, Drive, Northcott Narratives, This is Living and Junk Theory with the company.I have edited a magazine in Amsterdam, been part of setting up a community arts space, Irene Warehouse, in Melbourne, been a projectionist at the Coober Pedy Drive In, organised activist media events, been part of putting together blockades, actions and protests and been the NT Triple J Arts Reporter.”(unexpected benefit of doing this list – finding old acquaintances!)
Andrew Yager
Andrew is the Managing Director of Real World Technology Solutions, an IT specialist in Sydney, Australia who supported comics on depression “kinds of blue”
Ben Baker
ben baker on IMDB – film buffs: that is one serious visual effects resume!
Casey Briggs
adelaide folk! here’s the president of the adelaide university union!
Deb Verhoeven
whoa. film awesomeness. here’s her wiki page, and her website best quality crab.
DJ Fitzgerald
Felicity Freeman
Jess Miller
Jessica Craig-Piper
Justin Morrissey
Kym Kani
Lawrence Ashford
Luke Launer
Lynne Vincent McCarthy
Marcus Westbury
finally. someone we can talk about! marcus is an awesome force to be reckoned with who renews cities for a hobby. check out the video on TED: cities as software. he’s an amazing connector of people and things, and has had a creative history in festivals, furthered by his role as artistic director of ISEA 2013 in australia. he’d be a big promoter of pozible project this is not art festival, which he founded. here’s his website & twitter.
Michael Fuller
Michelle Hovane
Miriam Lyons
Nathaniel Cosford
Sundari Carmody
Todd Keys
Zoe Bowman

we’re blogging everyday this month as part of Steve‘s little experiment to get us all blogging for 31 days in March. For more info, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #b03

10 Thrills We Newbies Experience That the Top Earners Have Forgotten

ms.gusset — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:56:56 +0000

that’s the title of a guest blog at problogger. thing is, none of ours are there, so here are the top ten gusset newbie blogging experiences:

there’s a spike in your statistics that proves that it’s not just your mum and google crawling your site.
you make a pact (blogging every day for the month of march, for example), and you stick to it.
the email arrives from THE ONE. it might be someone whose blog you’ve read for the last few years, someone you admire, or someone that you’ve met and would kill to work with. whomever it is, just you try wiping that smile off your face.
meeting that first person in real life that you.met.on.teh.interwebs through each others blogs.
the conversation with your friend who gets it: did you see? THEY MENTIONED ME ON THEIR WEBSITE. YES, THEM. THAT AMAZING PERSON WHO MUST LIVE ON ANOTHER PLANET AND SHITS ROSE PETALS.
someone recognises you on the street from your blog.
someone in the media wants you to talk about your blog. yup. you. that officially makes you a BLOGGER.
if you somehow do have the joy of making money from your blog, you know what that means, right? TAX DEDUCTIONS. finally, you get to claim for all the hosting, learning materials, wifi, iphone, laptop, travel and conferences that you’ve been paying for.
learning that it can be really fun to travel and contact the people that you’ve always admired, asking them out for a meal and a chat. the stuff that they tell you can be pure gold that you’d never otherwise hear.
someone you’ve met and missed from many, many years ago is now back in touch thanks to your blog.

we’re blogging everyday this month as part of Steve‘s little experiment to get us all blogging for 31 days in March. For more info, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #b03

the joy of slow.

ms.gusset — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:34:24 +0000

we should be sleeping. instead, we’re getting the coffee, ipod, and a nice big list ready to get things organised tonight. why? we’re expecting wool tomorrow. thankfully, not the whole ton is arriving, but enough for the courier to enquire if we had a forklift. where exactly we’d keep a forklift in a third floor apartment is a tad beyond us, but it doesn’t hurt to check, right?

bonus of getting your own wool processed - named bales!

TON OF WOOL been a really wonderful process so far, and it’s had us thinking about doing things slow – thanks to steve hopkins of blogging everyday in march for the slow reminder. TON OF WOOL (getting a ton of wool processed in australia from sheep to skein) has been much faster and simpler than what we expected. we’re so thrilled to be able to bring a local product to market, and to acknowledge the change (albeit tiny) that is being made – to how wool is processed, to what craftspeople know about their wool, to being able to purchase wool safe in the knowledge that it hasn’t left the country before you’ve bought it.

blogging and the website is going to be incredibly slow compared to the breakneck speed we remember working at in new media where the deadline was yesterday. we know – there’s a wealth of things that need improving, changing and a decent spit and polish around here. we’ll keep on staring wistfully at sites like ali edwards or the pitcher plant project (we smell a book coming on!) and skein yarn. for now though, it will do.

handmade, slow: 3 magazines to look out for

ms.gusset — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:05:47 +0000

we’re thrilled to see the rise of the slow and handmade, and one way of gauging interest is media. launching on kickstarter today, with half of their goal already reached is handmade, a magazine from juniper moon farm. juniper moon farm holds a special place in our heart – through offering subscriptions to yarn and fiber to urban folk, they’ve also offered an education into the rural way of life, and made it so much more than just buying the end product.
we’re tossing up what to sign up for, but a tshirt about a handknit revolution is a winner:

the revolution will be hand knit

amanda blake soule – a mum with 3 books behind her about the handmade & family, she’s now branching out into a magazine, taproot “a quarterly magazine celebrating local living through writing, photography and the arts, both fine and domestic.”:

taproot

then there’s the local goodness of slow “Slow Magazine Australia is a low gear lifestyle publication that delivers authentic content focusing on life in the slow lane, especially in regional Victoria.”. slow magazine seems to have lived up to their name and started slowly, but are meandering beautifully with design awards for their pages, and wonderful local stories. check out the tasters about living slow on their site, and grab a hard copy to slowly work your way through.

slow magazine australia - issue ten

we’re blogging everyday this month as part of Steve‘s little experiment to get us all blogging for 31 days in March. For more info, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #b03

nikki gabriel goodness, spot the chart, inspiration

ms.gusset — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:15:56 +0000

after several phonecalls and enquiries (we’re terribly good at getting lost) we finally made it to the nikki gabriel sale. nikki had the most amazing dress on, which was either a dress from the summer 09 collection, or something very similar.
while we didn’t take any photos in the store of the small selection available, as luck would have it, we spotted one of her designs in the wild at the north city 4 launch, and begged. luckily, awesome model. lovin’ the coordinating beer:

nikki gabriel cardie

also spotted: machine knitting chart! we’re a sucker for the rose pattern, and here it is on the backs of mittens:

rose mitten backs

we’ve previously played around with the pattern, stopping and starting it, adding in standard rows of knitting and so forth to break it up:

rough roses

it’d be fun to revisit in the not too distant future.

finally, some inspirational knitwear spotted in the crowd – it’s a fine silver thread alternated with something more cotton/linen like:

inspirational stripes

we’re blogging everyday this month as part of Steve‘s little experiment to get us all blogging for 31 days in March. For more info, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #b03

melbourne fashion festival, knit/craft happenings

ms.gusset — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 02:39:21 +0000

we were just a tad shocked going through the craft victoria highlights of loreal melbourne fashion festival, which is on throughout march. their highlights have none of ours, so we figured…better let you know about ‘em.

starting tonight with their launch, material culture is an exhibition of RMIT textiles and design alumni (not only students, but also teachers & staff), which we’re hoping is going to be showcasing some wonderful knitwear. given that lotta apted locked herself away for a month with knitting machines, it’s looking good!

penthouse mouse will be showing another RMIT alumni – wendy voon who has her knitwear as part of the exhibition. also featured are gusset faves limedrop who are going from strength to strength in fashion.

wendy voon @ penthouse mouse

we’re particularly thrilled about the opening of the textile and fashion hub in richmond. having such a hub means that micro businesses and labels have a shot at sampling and/or creating a range and learning about the process here in australia, rather than relying on going overseas. we’re looking forward to seeing how we might be able to extend ton of wool into a product with them, if that’s feasible.

in terms of other events, nikki gabriel who specialises in hand/hand machined knitwear and a knitwear range for the DIY crowd, is running a pop up shop fri march 2nd, saturday 3rd. details on her blog.

also on this friday night is the launch of north city 4, a community space which offers tenancy, creativity and education in the form of a shared jewellery & object studio. launch night features marcus westbury, known as the guy whose hobbies include rejuvenating cities such as newcastle – check out the TED video.

finally, we’re turning a little new leaf here by blogging everyday in march. if you’d like to find out more about the challenge or how to contribute then head to the squiggly line.