Big knit [4]

Biggest knit yet! Size .18 needles, 40 stitches, 40 rows. It took 15 t-shirts, cut to ribbons of 4 cm size.

Could not sew the ends of the ribbons together – sewing  machine won’t do tricot, it breaks or bends the needle. So I did little knots – looked them up, they are called reef knots. These are strong enough and don’t show (almost).

Calculations:

Took me 4 hours to cut, stretch then knit a 75 cm wide x 40 cm long  piece, using 15 t-shirts. It weighs 920 grams and stretches to 110 x 65 without losing elasticity.

Extrapolate this: a piece that is about 2 m wide by 3 m long would be about 20x  as big, so it would take  300 t-shirts and weigh about 20 kg, and would take 80 hours.

An earlier try=out took me 1/2 hours to knit  a  14 wide x 39 cm long piece, using 2 t-shirts. It weighs 140 gram and stretches to 18 x 54 cm.

Extrapolate this: a piece that is about 2 m wide by 3 m long would be about 110 x as big, so it would take 220 t-shirts and weigh 15,5 kg, and would take 55 hours.

So one 2 m x 3 m knitted panel would take between 50 and 80 hours to knit, and we’d need 250 – 300 t-shirts. It would weigh between 15 and 20 kg.
For an installation I’d need at least 3 panels. So I need to find 1000 t-shirts and a group of 10 people to work on them for a week, taking it that one (wo)man can do 5 hrs effective in one day.

 

 

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