If You Want to Make the Gods Laugh…

…tell them your plans!

This is a phrase my mum has been repeating ever since I can remember, usually after a plan has gone awry. However, if I stop telling the world about my plans, who will know where I’ll (hopefully) be or what is coming up in my world of woolly goodness? So I think I’m going to have to keep risking it!

I ended last week’s blog by blithely saying that I would tell you all about the Buxton Wool Gathering today. Except I can’t, because it didn’t happen.

The organisers, Carole and Michelle, were absolute troopers and worked their socks off to keep us all informed and up to date with the latest weather situation in and around Buxton. I’d dug out the drive, our very wide pavement and both our cars and had just come back inside to find I’d had a missed call from Carole. They’d taken the very difficult decision to postpone the event as, even with the snow ploughs and gritters doing a tremendous job on the roads there was only one road in and out of Buxton and the access roads to and car park at the venue had not been touched and would be dangerous.

This is a little video taken in the afternoon of Friday once the snow had stopped coming down and it was actually starting to melt a little:

I was quite relieved not to have to travel in the snow, although of course the cancellation of the weekend was disappointing. However, within a few hours, Carole and Michelle had got back to us, confirming the new weekend dates and asking for preferences about which of the bank holiday days we would like to hold the show over. Anyone who couldn’t make the new weekend would have their stand fee refunded or held over for the next year. The Premier Inn in Buxton were even able to move our booking to the new weekend in May as well, so we haven’t lost out there either.

You may have noticed I used the words Bank Holiday and May together. The new dates for Buxton Wool Gathering are 7th and 8th May 2023. This is the Sunday and Monday of the Bank Holiday weekend. What’s happening on the Saturday? Oh, just the small matter of Charles III’s coronation!

Anyone who bought a ticket for last weekend will be able to use it in May or get a refund via the website if they can no longer attend. So, the show countdown begins again – and this time there had better not be snow!

The Buxton organisers have also been wonderful on social media, keeping everyone updated and also sharing the many offers and sales posts from vendors on their stories.

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I did use the unexpected extra time wisely over the weekend (once I’d got my poor aching muscles warm again after all that digging). I told you last week that I was going to cast on the back for my new design and I did. In fact I finished the back on Friday. I even started knitting the Left Front. And then, on Saturday, I started to get one of those niggling feelings…

You know the type – a thought in the back of your mind that you’ve missed something important. I went back to my submission file. I had missed something out. Something quite important indeed – a decorative panel that runs up the centre back. Not only did I forget to knit it, I forgot to include it in the pattern – although it was in the working drawing. I’m not quite sure where or when the panel fell out of my brain.

If you’re a knitter you’ll know that different stitch patterns have different gauges (resulting in the same number of stitches taking up a different amount of space) and it wasn’t simply going to be a matter of popping the panel in, job done. I had to recalculate the whole back, change and move the shaping, and then alter the length of the garment, so the pattern in the panel stopped at the right point when it got to the back neck. For all ten sizes. That also meant altering the patterns for the front pieces too so they match. Basically re-doing a lot of my previous work. So thank goodness I had some extra time I wasn’t expecting to enable me to do this!

Fortunately I hadn’t knitted too much of the Left Front so I was able to switch to the new version of the pattern fairly easily. I finished that and knitted the Right Front yesterday. And I’ve cast on the back – again. I decided that as I’d been sent more yarn than the garment would take I would simply start again with the back rather than rip the old one out and re-use the yarn.

I can’t show it to you yet as it’s for a magazine, but when you do see it, you’ll know a bit about what went in to getting that pattern and garment to the end point!

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The one bit of knitting I CAN show you is a little more progress on Umbriel. Having the extra time at the weekend and being forced to press pause on the cardigan while I rewrote the pattern meant I was able to seam the shoulders and start one of the sleeves. I’ve picked up more stitches than the pattern states (I usually do for top down sleeves) and I’ve done about half of the short row sleeve cap.

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My teeth are letting me down again too – once more unto the dentist dear friends! The second tooth that broke a few weeks ago was a clean break but the large filling seemed stable and the dentist and I decided to take the option of leaving it be. My teeth had other plans; yesterday the whole filling came out – not so stable after all. Thank goodness they were able to fit me in with an appointment when I rang this morning – for tomorrow afternoon! It seemed almost unreal when the receptionist asked if I could come in tomorrow – I said yes very quickly, as you might imagine. So, barring floods, storms, plagues of locusts or anything else that might get thrown my way, I should be able to at least start getting this enormous hole filled tomorrow.

Apologies for the lack of photos – I will aim to have more I can show you next week. Take care, stay warm and safe, and have a good week. K x