Polka Dots and Photos

By Megan Goodacre

Polka Dots and Photos

The Arbois Cardigan is coming together, we got some great photos yesterday; meanwhile here's a behind the scenes look at my wardrobe assistant helping me out. We're pretty glamorous here at Tricksy.

After all the planning, sketching, editing, knitting, correcting, blocking, finishing, correcting, tweaking, the most challenging part of the creative process in this self-publishing lark is the photos.

I feel that it is most genuine to model the garments myself; here is a real human being in a real sweater. It's all very well to salivate over Rowanesque models with dewy skin draping themselves over some historically significant cow pen, but, in real life, most of us knitters are regular people in all sorts of regular (or irregular) shapes and sizes.

Ideally, I'd have a professional photographer on retainer (which would be fabulous) but that's not realistic or cost effective. So, that means I either take the pictures myself, which involves putting the camera on self-timer and running back and forth or using a shutter cable which forces me to stand quite close to the camera.

Or, I enlist family members to be my photographer. Which mine have quite cheerfully done on several occasions. And once we get past the technical questions (like, "why isn't the camera turning on?" and "why is the flash popping up?") it can work quite well, as long as we can all get a little zen about the whole thing.

Yesterday, Charles and little C were my photo team on our photo shoot by the pipeline. The pipeline is what carries the water from the reservoir into town, and it has a strange industrial-age-one-horse-town-graffitti kind of aesthetic. It can be a pretty good backdrop for photos, and is usually pretty deserted. We used it in the Ferguson Cowl and the Clairette Cardigan.