Week 4 – Playtime! We saw colourful children’s fancy dress outfits and wall hangings for their bedrooms.
This week we saw a return of crochet for the individual challenge – to create a child’s play outfit, and with seven contestants left the team challenge had one team of four and the other of three. With both judges and competitors gaining experience of the show’s format and its limitations, and the competitors becoming more skilled at speed-crafting, the creativity in meeting the challenges rose to a new level.
Individual task
This week, the contestants had twelve hours to create a child’s play outfit that would be instantly recognisable and unique, with the body made from a variety of crochet stitches, headgear and embellishments/accessories that all had to fit and work well together. Di would be looking at fit and fastenings.
We saw a fox outfit by Holger (Di loved the tail), a knight’s outfit by Simon (popular with the toddlers who modelled the outfits), a lion by Lydia (the judges noted the buttons weren’t crocheted), a zebra by Ailsa (“you have carefully worked out the height of each crochet stitch”), a crayon by Dipti (judged to be oversized and simple), a bee by Tracy (the wings were “a bit too heavy”), and an explorer by Isaac (“lovely textured crochet stitching”).
Our Aztec style crochet mask would probably have been too scary for the toddlers (in the Knitting & Crochet Guild Collection)
Fishermen in British waters often wore ganseys to protect them from the elements. Our excuse for including this is that their children will have played in their own small-sized versions! (in the Knitting & Crochet Guild Collection).
Team challenge
It sounded simple – create a wall hanging for a child’s bedroom. Then the judges added constraints – the design process must use the game where you fold a piece of paper and each participant draw a part of the body without looking at what was drawn previously – it needed to be interactive and sensory – and it should be coherent,
The two teams used different approaches, both mainly knit. One concentrated in the interactive and creative aspects to make a sea creature with zips and parts that could be taken off and on. The other went for a colourful, texture rich design that was creative but planned how the whole would work as a single hanging.
The sea creature was judged as very “busy” and poorly joined (the team was working up to the last minute). The judges commented on the lack of interactivity of the other, and its plain cream background, but commended how it had been designed to fit together.
Our Collection has several wall hangings, and we have chosen two that are close to the theme of the challenge.
Machine knit representations of games – playing cards, snakes and ladders, backgammon and draughts. From the Knitting & Crochet Guild Collection.
As we approach Christmas, this wall hanging from the Knitting & Crochet Guild Collection has seasonal appeal.
Learning more about topics raised in this episode
While judging the team challenge, Di commented that knitters and crocheters “need to think about finishing before you start”. What does that mean?
“Finishing” is used to describe the steps in making a project look its best: how pieces are started and stopped, how they are joined together, fastenings are attached, ends sewn in, and anything else that affects how your item will look. With forethought, the cast-on and cast-off edges can be made to look the same, sewing up can be made easier (and the join invisible), stripes matched up and, as in the programme, different pieces joined invisibly.
Next episode
Next week’s challenges will be based on “knitted food that is good enough to eat” and “the ultimate textured cardigan”.
