A friend has commissioned a small knitted video tape sculpture from me and, realizing that it may not be available until after the gift is needed, she has graciously extended my delivery date. She would like to give it as a gift for a June 11 event, and I'm simply swamped with the "tree cozy" project between now and then.

However, knowing that I want to do her project in a specific style, I'm taking advantage of the manic knitting I'm doing now to practice the technique I want to use for her project. So last night I started in on a skein of yarn and 5 double-pointed needles, knitting squares from the center out. I got 5 squares done, starting with the simplest form and, making a few that aren't all that pretty, I worked out a design I'm happy enough with to expand on further.

I'm thinking that, come Sunday, I'll be putting yarn away for a while and taking my video tape back up.

A friend has asked me to create some pieces from audio cassette tape for her to give as a gift. She's supplied me with about 30 tapes and has plenty more where they came from*. So I'm swatching the fiber in knit and crochet fabrics to see what I like and here are some observations I've made about the two plastics:

Video tape spools are pretty easy to remove from the cassette—take out 5 screws, pry the cassette apart, cut the tape (be sure to rewind the tape before removing the screws) and set it aside. Toss everything else into the box to ship to greendisk**.

Audio tape fiber just has to be snipped and used straight from the cassette since the cassettes don't really come apart and if they did you'd just have a mass of loose fiber rather than neatly spooled tape.

Video tape can be a bit squeaky when you're working with it; haven't noticed much sound coming from the audio tape. I would call that ironic, I think.

I only double up the video tape for sturdy, free-standing items like shopping bag bottoms or boxes and things. Audio tape is not really usable in a single strand. I've experimented with multiple strands—3, 5, 6—to get the results I want.

Video tape comes in a flattering black color—consistently, no matter who made the tape. Audio tape comes in a range of shades from black to light brown and varies by manufacturer. 

*Before you ask, I'm good on my audio tape stock at the moment. I'll put out a call when I need more. 

**I send pretty much everything except the tape along with bum CDs and other techno-trash to greendisk.com.

Back in November we took a trip to the Midwest to visit family. I took along the project I was working on at the time—the diagonal stripes for the Lamp Post Cozy called "Don't Hit Me." (Project #8 at http://videoknitter.weebly.com/index.html) The concept for the piece was to make the lamp post base more visible because it had been dinged by several cars in its short life in the Bemis parking lot. It's now covered with orange and yellow diagonal stripes and accented with cables and ruffles.

So during the trip various family members would ask me what I was knitting. "A stripe" was my usual reply. Without fail, every time I said that I had to explain what I meant by my answer and to assure them I wasn't being a trying to fool them.

I'm cleaning and reorganizing the garage. Two month-long projects are at completion and I have another sorting project to do in the next few weeks, and the weather's still warm enough to work in an unheated garage, so this is the time that was foreordained.

One of my goals is to better organize my materials storage. Since my studio is only so big I tend to store a lot of materials in "studio annex." Over the years it's kind of moved to wherever there was room—larger unsold artwork in this corner, smaller stuff in bins over here, stained glass on these shelves, tools for class in that area. And then there are boxes of books that don't fit in our "library," Christmas decorations, and a bunch of other stuff all mixed in.

A few larger items have gone out via freecycle this weekend and more will go to local thrift stores. But part of what triggered this reorganization is the influx of video tapes I had no storage area for. We had two large boxes invisibly labeled "for Jua" and then Juergen, one of the guys at my co-op, decided I needed to have his box of tapes as well. So, yesterday, two of the three boxes were unpacked and the tapes housed (once room had been made for them). That still leaves me with another unpacked box, a stack inside the house that's about 30" high, and a bag of audio cassettes I just got today from a friend that need homes. My goal is to get them all in one place, but that may not happen at this point.

Part of my preparation for this cleanout/reorganize was to watch the first season of "Hoarders." Interesting show! And if I weren't utilizing the video tapes for artwork I definitely wouldn't be taking more tapes into the collection. Luckily I haven't needed to break out the snow shovel to shift any of my stuff. That's when you know things have really gotten bad.