What a Week

RiverKnits‘ Open Day on Saturday was wonderful. A gorgeously sunny day that wasn’t too hot, with friendly, welcoming people to chat to and relieve of their yarn (usually in exchange for money!).

I got to meet some lovely dyers I hadn’t encountered before, such as Larissa from Travel Knitter, from whom I got this intensely coloured sock yarn. This will become a cowl with a poem by my lovely wife that has been translated into Morse code!:

and Ishrat from Fruitful Fusion, whose colour palette was so varied. I fell for this skein of 4-ply, called ‘Spring Bloom’, which reminds me very much of the colours in our front border:

It was lovely to see Becci and Markus again and make some plans (intrigued? good! I’ll tell you more soon). I came away with these wonderful skeins of Aysgarth and something else that I’m not going to share with you yet!

I also bought some of the Open Day Show Special yarn, dyed jointly by Becci from RiverKnits and Lola from Third Vault Yarns, and called ‘Ankh-Morpork’ in reference to the covers of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books that inspired the colourway. A skein of Cormo in the darker batch for me, and a skein of Corriedale and Mohair for Anne, whose birthday it is today! (Happy Birthday Anne, glad you love it!). This is my skein:

As well as all of this yarny goodness, I treated myself to some new washi tape from Katie Green Bean. I was tempted by this at Wonderwool and seeing it again I couldn’t resist. Washi tape with hand drawn sheep! How could you resist??

So, we had a great couple of hours there and also chatted with Sharon from Dragon Hill Studio, talked to the sheep, listened to Johnny from Garthenor Organic talk about the process of transforming fibre into wool and went for a walk around the little village of Weedon Bec and along the canal towpath.

The walk was particularly important as it had taken three and a half hours to get there (traffic delays plus a much-needed service station stop added to the two and a half we had expected) and then nearly three and a half to get home (more traffic). Another time I will work out a route that bypasses the M6 completely…!

And then last night was the first of a series of three workshops in Mold, in conjunction with Anne at Yarn O’clock. We had the cafe of the Daniel Owen Centre, which is a good, well-lit space with plenty of tables that they didn’t mind us moving around to suit.

The workshop was two-colour brioche knitting and the six ladies who attended were wonderful! Despite being a bit flummoxed initially by the Italian two-colour cast-on, they all persevered with good humour and made great progress! Everyone got the main fabric sorted out, learnt how to do an increase and all tried a right-leaning decrease. We didn’t get as far as the sewn cast-off, but they have a reliable youtube link to refer to if they want to try it and several other options were given as well.

The next workshop is in two weeks at the same venue and is Beginners’ Crochet – there are still a couple of spaces on that one.

In designing news I have completed the charts for my Nevern Expansion Pack and will be knitting a couple of samples of the (six!) new squares soon. Two of them are based on this part of the Nevern Cross:

The veg patch is filling out, the embroidery I started recently (main pic) is going well (and the deadline is looking slightly more reachable) and I’ve even got the rest of my summer clothes out of the vacuum pack bag in the wardrobe!

So that’s been the week in my little world. I’ve deliberately not written about wider events as some of them are beyond words, but if you have been impacted by what’s been occurring around the world recently, I am so sorry.

Hold your loved ones close when you can and tell them you love them. Stay safe and make stuff. K x