Making a growing hedge (a summary)

I did drawings earlier with the plants obscuring the house but I want to link this to the wool.

I’d like to reveal the house again, after it gets obscured, by unravelling the wool but the chaotic knitting which I used here to represent the disorder of the garden doesn’t unravel neatly.

Using the fringe of wool that I made before I had a go at stop motion animation.

I made several videos but Blogger refuses to load more than one. Here is another version which I uploaded to Vimeo who very kindly allowed me to turn the main action into a GIF

Additionally I experimented with using scissors to cut the knitted hedge. The problem with this was initially my clumsiness with the camera and then getting the cuttings to fall realistically even though they were on a slope. I used bulldog clips to hold the hedge in place but that meant that I couldn’t complete the cut to allow visitors to the house to get to the front door without stepping over wool.

The video is on my Vimeo site here

I knitted the hedge again in a plain stitch so that it would be easier to unravel.

I went to the wool shop to look for pretty, plant like wool but there was nothing exciting.

I knitted it too big so the unravelling wasn’t entirely smooth but I’ve managed to edit it. The video is here on Vimeo.

It’s still too long and next time I will film it upside down so that I can pull the wool more smoothly to unravel

I redid my knitting so that I could reveal the new house and videoed it on my phone. It’s impossible to unwind wool smoothly so I exported the video into iMovie and cut out the pauses. The resulting video is fine for the hedge being cut but it needed reversing for it to look like it was growing. iMovie for iPad doesn’t have a reverse button and my mac is so old that I can’t run the program any more. My original plan was to get one of my kids to reverse the movie although its a big file.

I also wanted there to be wool in the window when the hedge grows up so I explored the video editing capabilities of Procreate, first by adding a blob of colour. 

This was reasonably successful but I’d failed to appreciate that when I rubbed out any mistakes although the individual frame looked fine when I ran the movie there were white flashes.

I redid the balls of wool being careful not to use the rubber facility. When I ran the movie wool looked like it  was pulsing because the individual frames were hand drawn. I’m sure that there is a way to create a brush or something so that a consistently sized ball of wool appears in each frame but my time to learn about the program is limited. The pulsing does draw attention to the ball of wool, I had it moving around the window in my first version but it just looks odd to me so I edited it to stay still. Whilst playing with Procreate I found the ping pong feature which made the hedge grow up and recede. This laid out the frames back to front which was brilliant, I sent the movie back to iMovie and cut the receding hedge part so I had just the growing bit.

The flashing ball of wool was irritating me so I sewed some real wool into my picture

and remade the video.

Again  I experimented with colouring the ball of wool to represent the change but it’s not professional enough for this project. 

With the set up I have (my phone and a swan neck holder) I don’t have the option to switch the coloured wool without moving everything. I’ve edited it so the hedge starts to grow up close to the start so hopefully it won’t look too out of place