When I saw the pattern for this artwork, I knew I had to make it for my daughter Maddie. We raised her and her brother with a love for early film comedians. Her senior thesis in Art History argued that the silent comedians and the Marx Brothers, though they never defined themselves as such, were actually part of the Dada movement. The last photo here is of her presenting her thesis conclusion.

I’ve saved the extra yarn from this project in case a Buster “Stone Face” Keaton pattern ever appears to go along with this one (my nominee). I don’t have the artistic chops to make one myself.

A couple of discoveries I made in this creation journey:

• When switching colors mid-row for every-other ridge, I needed to use an intarsia link to connect the yarns. I thought I would need to do that with the color for the next ridge, too, to keep the dropped yarn connected. That wasn’t necessary. I just picked it up the next time I needed it. I tried it both ways, and just couldn’t tell the difference from the front of the work.
• Whenever I can, I use the magic of knitting to make seaming unnecessary. When connecting the mitered edges to mount around some hardboard, I’d pick-up-and-knit (for the front of the board), pick-up-and-k2tog (for the edge of the board), and pick-up-and-k3tog (for the back of the board). On one of the seams on the very last edge this looked terrible, because it had to be done on the wrong side. So I did a pick-up-and-purl, pick-up-and-ssp, and pick-up-and-sssp (more complicated, actually, there was a lot of stitch-shuffling to set up for those stitches). That got pretty complex and wasn’t quite as neat looking. Next time I do this sort of thing, I may make the edges mitered by increasing or decreasing on both ends for every right side row to avoid the weirdness entirely. Or, you know, stop being lazy and just seam the things.

I knit the whole project with US5; I only used US7 to bind off. Without the edges, the knitted picture, unblocked, ended up about 25.5”x25.5”. That seemed a fair candidate for a 30”x30” cradled hardboard. We added some dust cover paper to the back, some super steel hangers, and some 30-lb. coated picture wire, before adhering the Velcro as Woolly Thoughts recommends. Woolly Thoughts and Artists Network were very helpful in making some of these decisions.

As you can see in the pictures, some of the fabric needs to be straightened out a bit more. But it’s now 3 days before Christmas, and that may have to happen after it’s unwrapped. So much to do! ⭐