I fell in love with the title of this painting by Emily Carr the first time I saw it. And although this is certainly not the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen, I find it evocative and powerful. It speaks to me of finding something ugly, barren, rejected, and seeing in it beauty and joy and life.

Members of Jane Thornley’s group are knitting projects inspired by favourite paintings, so just for fun, I’m going to try to knit a wall hanging inspired by this painting. Although I think that to do this painting justice, it should really be knit in airy brushed mohairs (more air than yarn). However, I’m going to have to make do with the mixed bag of yarns I have.

I started out knitting a roughly triangular crown of the tree, and then started knitting circularly around it, using short rows to fill out the circle. I used Old Shale stitch to give the impression of billowing clouds.

Eventually I squared off the top and sides of the circle. For the land at the bottom of the painting, I knit back and forth with short rows. The tricky part was knitting and grafting the two oddly-shaped pieces together.

Feb 2014: Finally well and truly finished! Although I finished the knitting of this in July 2011, I didn’t mount it on anything, and so it sat rolled up in my box of knitting. Last summer I dyed some fabric with Japanese indigo, and I used that to make a quilted backing. I quilted the knitting to this, letting my sewing follow the lines of the knitting, to create slight 3-dimensional relief. It’s finally hanging on my wall!

This is a place of high skies, blue and deep and seldom cloudless… On days like today, the relationship between trees and the sky is very close.
- Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands