A Little Discovery

So I was "strolling" around Ravelry a while ago looking at projects, and I came across this fabulous bag:

I just think she did a great job. (Click on the picture to go to her blog post about it.) But of course, when I saw what she did, I thought maybe I can do that...to David Bowie.

Around the same time as seeing this bag which is done in Tunisian crochet, I read about a technique of pixelating a photograph to convert it to a knitting pattern. Seeing the method laid out convinced me that I could maybe get this to work.

My first thought was to use an image from this Bowie poster that I have:

But I thought it might be a little too detailed to capture in a two-toned image. Plus, Bowie is completely over that Ziggy stage (he was over it for most of the time that he was doing the tour, actually) so why should I keep  him in it?

I started looking on the web and settled on this pic:

I know, I know he's smoking. But let's be honest, smoking is cool...when you do it right. (If only it weren't so expensive and didn't kill you...big sigh...) I find the image very appealing, it's at a good age, it's not too stagey and shows Bowie, I think, not one of his many characters.

Now imagine, I am looking through a knitting book in the store and I come across a project where the author has an image of a "poster boy" on the side of a bag. I look at the image:

I am completely bowled over. That is the picture of David Bowie. Really...look again:

It's reversed, but it's the same image. I find it interesting that the author never identifies it as Bowie. But it's got to be, don't you think?

I am writing about all this now because I just got the book the pattern is in Stitch 'N Bitch Nation from the library. I've been stalking it at my LYS and Hobby Lobby and finally clued in that I could request it from the state library network and peruse it for a while before buying. I've been enjoying it, even though a lot of the patterns are a little too "slap dash" for me.

Now to decide if I have time to make this bag or if I have to just dream about it. Looking through the book in more detail now, I see that the bag is not felted (which I thought it was) and that makes it somewhat flimsy and floppy. I'm considering redoing the design so I can felt it, but then I get tired out just thinking about it. I may just knit it as is, but with nice leather handles instead of the knit ones.

Meanwhile I had fun looking at Bowie images. I thought this one might be a good one:

I could do just his right eye in the bright blue. (His other eye is darker...they don't match.)

This is another nice one:

Much younger one there! So fresh.

Alright, I'm going to go back to looking through my pattern book...