Narrated Chairs

Theme Chairs

Cirque du soleil

With each chair I teach myself a new technique which I can explore while knitting. I taught myself to knit circles and then I obsessed on it, deciding to felt them so they would become a homogenous mass. The chair magically transformed into a riot of whimsy, with circles of color playing off each other like performers in a three-ringed circus.

Upside down Garden

When I first saw this lattice back chair, I knew what it called for. The lattice, obviously, needed a vine and some flowers growing up and around it. When I began to think more about what’s beneath the flowers, that’s when it turned all topsy-turvy. I remembered scenes from the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, and reminisced about past fever dreams — real things taking on an unreal appearance and changing into the unexpected. Wanting to manifest these images led me to experiment crocheting in a freestyle manner, creating three-dimensional shapes on the fly.

Beach Baby Bingo

This chair spoke to me immediately. The hour-glass curves on the back of the chair reminded me of bathing beauties and hot summer days on Coney Island. For the girls I had to invent a way to knit a figure wearing a swimsuit.Then came the memories of salt and sand, picnics, beach balls, the boardwalk and hanging out with your best friends.
friends.

Don't Sit On Me

My Friend, Mary Ellen, a fellow knitter, thought this chair would inspire me. As soon as she handed it over, I knew what it cried out for — a homage of America right down to the brace-back colonial construction and a bit of comic relief. Of course, “Don’t Sit on Me” is a play on the old colonial slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me,” which has been more recently appropriated by the Tea Party. This was the first chair where I started to felt the knitted application and add a little embroidery.

SeaScape

Since moving to the Mendocino coast, I’ve had lots of time walking by the Pacific Ocean, letting my thoughts roll over themselves. It is definitely a different environment from the downtown, action-packed, city of Chicago, which I was used to. While sitting on the headlands, as I loved to do, I wondered how I could capture the feeling of the rolling waves. The resolution was to knit layer on layer of gradient blue textures, bordered with accents of sea life.

Color Blind

I found this turn-of-the-century rocker in a dusty back room attic of an antique shop in Sebastapol. It’s age begged for a new makeover for the 21st century — with a little added whimsy. By limiting myself to a black and white palette, I tried to meld together the abstract designs used on the two-dimensional fabric constructs, with similar motifs woven over and around a three-dimensional chair form.

WHEN THE CATS AWAY

This started out as a queen Ann Chair and morphed into a menagerie of busy mice. An added roof was created, knitted ladders were inserted into the seat, a small mouse door added to one of its sides and a porthole was drilled out of the back piece. The mice are all felted out of wool roving

Super Hero Chair
I took one look at this chair form and decided it screamed Super Hero so that is what it became. The arms were built up a bit to create a bit more muscle and the cape is a wire structure that i built so the cape could appear to be flying in the wind. The entire chair has been knitted with 100% wool.