Knitted Growlers

growl-er

noun: 1. A person or thing that growls.

2. An artisan pork pie.

A few weeks ago I started work on my Knitted Growler, a distant relative of the Peppered Pork Pie Pig of the Black Forest, a tricky piece as it required the construction of said beast using real ingredients. It all looked rather promising at the start, my growler was going to be built around a small pork pie accompanied by pickled onions (which it digs up and eats) and other assorted ploughman's lunch type stuff.

The tricky bit was not the growler itself as this was quickly made by adding plasticine to the pork pie but the surrounding forest, a forest of celery. Not the greatest building material as it tends to wilt rather quickly, my celery wasn't that good in the first place and I found myself strengthening them with pipe cleaners and matchsticks.

 By the time I had got to the garnish a few hours later my forest had started to sag even more, adding in the cheese and cucumber helped liven things up but the celery had to be dunked in water to refresh it.

Working with speed I dished out the pickle, scattered onion skins around, added a few more lumps of cheese and took my photographs. The whole thing though had to be left for me to work with as I painted the first layers over the next two days, even though I refrigerated it overnight by the third day things were looking decidedly ropey and a thin pervading sweet sickly smell was filling the studio, the last day was spent painting and yacking like a dog in equal measures between brush strokes.

Needless to say it all went straight into the bin with the last brush stroke but what I was left with was the first view of a Knitter Growler, the mysterious beast that lives in a secret location just outside of Melton Mowbray.