Today I realised this will be my final blog post of 2024 as the next two Tuesdays are Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
If you’ve been reading along during the year, thank you for your company! It’s been quite a year and there’s still a lot to do before it’s done. Thankfully I feel much better now that the Covid has gone.
If you are planning to come to the North West Winter Wool Festival in Blackpool in February (15-16th), do think about buying an advance ticket. There will be 40 exhibitors at this new event for the North West and it promises to be a great weekend. It’s an absolute bargain at £6 for the day or £8 for the weekend or you could even treat yourself and buy a day ticket that includes a cream tea for £20! Plus, with an advance ticket purchase you also get an exclusive knitting pattern to download for free!
The Imperial Cowl is named in honour of The Imperial Hotel where the festival will be taking place and I really enjoyed working on the pattern. There are options for using either DK or Aran weight yarn, with two sizes included for each yarn weight and the pattern also gives you the option of working flat or in the round! Not only that, the pattern also includes links to some short video tutorials I recorded to show you how to work the tuck stitches – they’re really easy, just using abbreviations that might be less familiar.
The pattern will only be available to advance ticket holders for the festival until mid-March 2025, at which point it will be available to buy from all my usual platforms, and as a printed pattern at future yarn shows.
I will also be teaching at four yarn shows during the year – and there are a range of workshops at different events. Keep an eye on the website in the New Year when I will get all the info listed.
Have you heard of the Knit Happy Summit? This is an online event that is taking place 23-26th January and I am one of the speakers. I will tell you lots more about it in my next post!
We’ve recently been sorting through a heap of Mum’s sewing and lace threads as part of preparing her move and I am fairly confident I will never need to buy thread again. I also completed a bobbin lace bookmark Mum had started a while while back and it felt good to be working with the bobbins again – many of which Dad had made himself. The random ends of thread are from needing to add in a new bobbin when one ran out of thread. So, as Mum made the first half, I made the second half and Dad made a lot of the bobbins, it’s quite the family bookmark! What do you think?
I hope you have a good festive season however you spend it and that you get a chance to do some stuff that makes you happy during the next few weeks. Until next year, take care! K x
So the last week has been interesting. I had Covid for the first time and it fairly knocked me flat. Two full days in bed, two more days on the sofa not doing anything, two days where I was able to do a bit of work at my desk. Yesterday we left the house briefly for the first time and today we had a walk. My sense of smell completely vanished and it affects your sense of taste far more than I realised. It’s starting to come back now which is a relief. I even cheered when my lovely wife, who’s also been ill, came into the lounge last night and said “It smells of old farts in here!” My reply was “You can smell again – brilliant!”
And this morning we woke to find the broadband in our area is down. So, no Wi-Fi, no landline (thanks full fibre for the digital phone) and, as our thermostat is on the Wi-Fi, I don’t think I can advance the heating either! News via the local Facebook group says it should be fixed tonight, but varies between that being a ‘this evening’ tonight or an ‘early hours of the morning’ tonight.
At least we have the gas fire and plenty of woolly layers! And hurrah for 4G data.
I suspect it’s part of the fallout from the latest storm. We escaped lightly from that. 60+ mph winds all day on Saturday, but no damage and utterly grateful to live up a big hill so no flooding either. Mostly of the town seems to be without broadband at the moment and some have been so for days.
I picked up my knitting again on Sunday, having not done any since last Monday (as Spike Milligan once said: “I told you I was ill!”) and it felt really soothing. It’s a new design, due out next year and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.
There’s another new design coming out soon which is an exclusive freebie when you buy an advance ticket for the North West Winter Wool Festival. Tickets are on sale already and the link to the pattern will be available soon. The show is in February (15-16) so there’s plenty of time to knit the pattern up and wear it when you come to the show! The pattern will then be publicly available to buy from mid-March. I may even have a photo or two to share with you next week…!
In the meantime, there are some Flying the Shawls 2025 calendars still here that I would love to send to new homes for the new year. You may have spotted my post on Facebook and Instagram yesterday, but if not:
The offer? If you add the calendar to your Payhip basket, you can also add the Fiery Dragon Skin Cowl digital pattern at a whopping 50% discount! No code is required, just click the ‘add to my basket’ button that pops up. The calendar will be posted to you and you will be able to download the pdf of the pattern once you check out both items.
Why did I choose this pattern as the one for such a special offer? It’s a one-skein pattern that knits up quickly and there are options for almost any weight of yarn (apart from lace) included within the pattern. So, if you need to knit a gift that doesn’t take too long and you have 100g of yarn (from 4-ply to chunky), this pattern has you covered. Personally, I’ve knitted this pattern in 4ply, sport weight hand-spun, DK and Chunky hand-spun yarns.
Another joy of Brexit is that rules about selling to the EU (which for the purposes of this new law also includes Northern Ireland) are changing imminently and many small businesses have been discussing what they will and won’t be able to do, so to ensure I don’t accidentally fall foul of any new exporting rules, this offer is only available to folk in Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) – sorry!
I hope you are keeping dry, warm and well, and that you get to do some things that make you happy this week. Take care, K x
Yesterday I was admiring the fuchsia that was still in flower, and today everything is covered in a thick blanket of snow! As I type this, the snow has stopped for now and there are lumps of snow falling off the telephone wires and the thinner tree and bush stems which makes them ‘ping’ back up dramatically. There’s also a blackbird in the garden on the hunt for food and I hope it finds the holly berries and rose hips soon as they start to reappear.
I forget how the snow changes the quality of light in the house – everything is brighter and it seems like a good day to make a short tutorial video or two later on.
On Sunday we were at Stollen & Wolle, held at the RiverKnits studio in Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire. It was a lovely day, being surrounded by the smell of mulled wine, happy creative conversations and, in the afternoon, live music from Becci, Markus and others on the accordion and fiddles! We even had some vegan stollen during the day that was very tasty indeed. I came away with a skein of gorgeous DK yarn from Fruitful Fusion that will be knitted up into one of the samples for a new design coming out early next year. I wound it up before remembering to take a photo of it in the skein.
It was a beautifully sunny morning at RiverKnits and we were pleased with how many people came – it was a really busy and buzzy atmosphere.
Rain began a little by the later part of the afternoon which led to a wet and dark journey home and there had clearly been some accidents on the road. As I get older I find night driving in the rain more stressful than I used to and many people I’ve spoken to say they feel the same. Do headlights and spray from other vehicles bother you when driving at night?
Today, I will not be travelling anywhere. I have declared a snow day, as have all the local schools. We may go for a walk later (Becci from RiverKnits recommends a snowball fight, which might be a plan if followed up with hot chocolate), but the car is staying on the drive!
That does allow more time for knitting – and video recording as mentioned!
This coming weekend we will be in Welwyn Garden City for Wool-in Garden City – the second time this year as the first one was in January! On Saturday 23rd I will be teaching in the Pop-Up shop in the Howard Centre and on Sunday 24th we will be one of the 19 vendors exhibiting at the wool show at Oaklands College.
Tickets for both brioche workshops are still available at £30 each – you can book a workshop place here (scroll to the bottom of the page, click in the ‘Choose an option’ box, and scroll to the bottom of the list for the two brioche workshops). Entry to the wool show on Sunday is £7 on the door or £6 in advance.
As I’ve been knitting on samples for two new designs, there has only been a little progress with the new cardigan:
That’s all from me for today. If you are coming to Wool-in Garden City on Sunday, please say hello! (I’m hoping the snow will have cleared up by then!)
In the meantime, stay warm and dry as much as you can, and do something that makes you happy. K x
Saturday’s workshop at Bakewell Wool Gathering was great and all those attending made excellent progress with their first ever brioche knitting.
My lovely wife drove us over to Bakewell – it was our first opportunity to have a look at the town so we had a wander around in the late afternoon sun and bought a couple of vegan Bakewell tarts. The town was incredibly busy so we stopped at Buxton for a meal before continuing home.
Tonight’s Zoom workshop is the follow-on to the Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Knitting workshop that I taught on Saturday and two weeks ago on Zoom: it’s Next Steps in Two-Colour Brioche Knitting. There’s still time to book a place! It runs from 7-9pm BST (that’s GMT +1) and we’ll recap the increase and decreases covered in the Intro workshop and add another one of each for good measure! If you are confident in your basic brioche stitch and want to extend your brioche skills this is definitely the workshop for you.
As well as my current patterns and kits, I will also have copies of Prynhawn Da with me – available in individual printed format for the first time.
It seemed silly to be at an event in North Wales and not to have one of my Welsh named patterns there!
I highly recommend coming along to the Designer Day – it’s not a ticketed event, just turn up to Ewe Felty Thing, 24 Castle Street, Conwy 10am-5pm this Saturday.
My current commission knitting is coming along and I’m nearly halfway through the second colour. Once that’s done, I’ll need to block, measure, finish and check the pattern and get it all sent off.
If you can’t get to North Wales this weekend, I’ll also be at Stollen & Wolle with RiverKnits and several other amazing creative folk on Sunday 17th November at the RiverKnit studio in Weedon Bec and at Wool-in Garden City on 24th November at Oaklands College, Welwyn Garden City. See my events page for all details and links for tickets.
Take care and do some stuff that makes you happy this week if you can. K x
I’ve caught up with the frogging I had to do last week and everything is now ticking along nicely with the new design. I should finish the main section of it fairly soon and add the second colour in.
I don’t think I have shown you the finished DK version of Into the Vortex, so here it is!
It still needs to be blocked and it will behave itself much better for photographs once that has been done.
Last Tuesday evening’s Zoom workshop worked very well and the knitters who attended made excellent progress having not tried brioche knitting before. I was really impressed with them and they had a lot of fun too!
I’m teaching the same workshop (Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Knitting) at Bakewell Wool Gathering this Saturday, 1.30-3.30pm. There are still spaces on the workshop if you’d like to attend – you can book in advance or ask on the day if there are still spaces available. You just need to bring 5mm circular needles (minimum 60cm long) with you.
If you already know how to work the basic brioche knit stitch and would like to extend your brioche knitting skills, I would encourage you to sign up for the Next Steps in Two-Colour Brioche Knitting Zoom Workshop on Tuesday October 22nd, 7-9pm, where we are going to work on this swatch:
The community choir (Shelby’s Singers) I lead sang in our town on Saturday afternoon as part of a free music festival. We had an hour’s slot, with the expectation to sing for 45 minutes. That’s a lot of songs! We did 13 songs, finishing with the song that has become ‘ours’ – ‘This is Me’ from The Greatest Showman. We change the final line to ‘This is Us’ and that has been added to the choir hoodies that arrived just in time for the performance!
So, this is us:
Prynhawn Da was published in Knit Now in May and I have now released it as an individual pattern on my website, Payhip and Ravelry. Prynhawn Da is Welsh for ‘good afternoon’, hence the title of today’s blog post! The coasters and placemats are not only pretty in themselves, but they are also a great introduction to Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Pi Shawl construction:
That’s everything from me today. I hope you have a good week and get a chance to do something you enjoy. K x
The Yarn Harlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) used to say (and probably still does) that fast knitters make big mistakes more quickly. She’s right!
This is what I knitted last week:
Except these are balls of wool, not knitting, so what happened? Sue said “Oh no!” when she saw me frogging this earlier on (frogging – as in you remove the knitting from the needles and ‘rip it, rip it’ out). However, my response to her was a very calm, “Don’t worry, it will be better”.
It had been bugging me that the repeated pattern in this design started alternately on a right side and then a wrong side row. Also that the number of stitches before the actual pattern began kept increasing. That meant I couldn’t condense the pattern and every row had to be written out, which, when it’s for a magazine and every page used matters, is a potential problem.
Lying in bed I wondered whether removing one plain row before the repeat section began would solve both issues I was having, so this morning I went to my charting programme and drew it out and guess what? It works! Five or more pages reduced to two and a half and the pattern becomes easier to follow as well. But it did mean I needed to undo all that yarn you see in the pic above.
Sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward.
This evening I am teaching my Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Workshop via Zoom. There are some major benefits to this: no one has to travel, you can attend from wherever you are as long as you have a reliable internet connection and my camera set-up means that everyone can see what I’m doing at the same time as though I were right next to them. It does mean that I can’t take someone’s knitting and fix it for them, but as long as they can hold it up to their camera I should be able to explain what they need to do differently to make it work. If you already know the basic brioche stitches and want to expand your brioche knitting skills, why not book on the Next Steps in Two-Colour Brioche Knitting Zoom Workshop? It’s on Tuesday 22nd October, 7-9pm (British Summer Time, which is GMT+1).
I had a lovely surprise on Thursday. I knew that my brioche cowl, named Menai, was due to be on the cover of the new issue (Issue 207) of The Knitter magazine, but I hadn’t realised they were also starting my four-part knit-along lace hap shawl Rhiannon in the same issue!
I was asked recently what my favourite fibre to knit with is and the answer was wool (from sheep). That may be because I’m so much more familiar with wool than other animal fibres, but the more you use them, the more you learn!
Both Menai and Rhiannon use alpaca yarn, which I was less familiar with before creating these designs. Rhiannon, the lace hap (square) shawl uses Cascade Yarns Alpaca Lace, which is 100% Alpaca. It was so soft to work with and created such a fluid fabric that I wasn’t sure if the blocking would hold the shapes of the lace stitches clearly, but it did and it blocked out beautifully. I used my hap stretcher to block it, propped up by the radiator.
Menai uses an Alpaca Sock yarn from UK Alpaca, and includes 25% nylon with the alpaca. Again the fabric flowed like water, which is one of the reasons I added the collar to the cowl, as otherwise it simply sat on the shoulders, which isn’t what you want a cowl to do really! Had it been worked in wool, it would have stood up on its own and would have looked completely different, but I’m glad it worked out the way it did with the alpaca as I really like the shape of the finished item which is part cowl and part mini poncho.
*As well as these two designs in issue 207, the County Shawl that I designed for James McIntosh’s Donegal 4ply yarn is in “The Knitter loves…” section!
It’s a great issue, full to brim with gorgeous accessories and some garments as well, from a range of brilliant designers, so if you are a knitter I heartily recommend you get a copy if you can.
I’m going to leave it there for today, get my desk set up for the workshop, and start re-knitting that lovely blue yarn (It’s West Yorkshire Spinners Elements DK).
Have a good week and do some stuff that makes you happy. Kx
Unusually today is not only blog day, but also the first of the month, which makes it newsletter day as well, so there will be quite some overlap in content between the two!
Yarndale was amazing, if a little chilly! If you came by the stand to say hello and have a browse, thank you so much. Customers said some lovely things about the samples on display and I heard a ‘C’est manifique’ from a group of French knitters which made me very happy. We also sold lots of patterns, kits and calendars during the weekend.
If you didn’t come to the show yourself, then here are a few pics to show you how the cattle pen (yes, that is what it usually is used for) was transformed over the course of three and a half hours on Friday afternoon:
My lovely wife Sue can be seen in one of the pics above having a very well earned sit-down after transporting most of the contents of our stand the entire length of the auction mart on the trolley (the car park was at the opposite end to where our stand was!) She was amazing and also held the fort for much of Saturday afternoon whilst I went to teach an Introduction to Two Colour Brioche Knitting workshop to ten intrepid knitters.
While I was at the stand later on Saturday looking for a pattern on the table, my badge caught on Tiffany (pinned across the front of the table) and snagged it quite badly. Nothing broke, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to fix it to look as if this had never happened!
I’m going to video the process which will hopefully encourage others to fix their own snagged knits.
We made some new friends as well as catching up with old ones – both other vendors and visitors to the show. I think one of the great things about yarn shows is that it’s a rare chance for most of the vendors see each other, so we make the most of catching up in snatched moments between setting up, or even when queueing for the loo!
I told you last week that I was racking my brains trying to work out how on earth I was going to put my banner up at Yarndale and that I eventually bought two mops with handles that unscrewed and had loops in the top. As you can see – the mop handles worked! Cable ties attached the banner to the metal mop handles and lots of string ties the mop handles to the metal rails of the pen (hidden behind the black sheets and Nevern Throw).
If you came by the stand you will have seen the little display of McIntosh yarns with the two designs that I have created with them. County Shawl was launched on Friday and I’m very excited about it. It uses the wonderful Donegal 4ply yarn in three colours. This semi-circular shawl may look complex but all the stitch patterns are slip stitch, knit and purl with a few little short rows to create the rows of bobbles, so it’s very achievable.
James McIntosh has put together three stunning colour-way choices for you as shown in the picture above. The grey and natural yarn pack also includes a gorgeous dark green which is shyly hiding behind the other two skeins. When you select your colour choices you can also choose to have a set of 3.75mm 150cm circular needles from Addi included in your kit. These needles are really nice to use and are very smooth.
Every kit includes the pattern and I get paid the full pattern price (£6) for every kit sold, which is rather splendid.
I am out and about with my designs again later this month. Ewe Felty Thing are hosting a ‘Designer Day‘ at their shop in Conwy on Saturday October 26 from 10-5, and I will be one of 5 designers taking part. It’s free to come along, so if you are anywhere near the North Wales coast, it would be lovely to see you! 26th October might seem like a long way off now, but it’s actually less than four weeks away!
I have been enjoying knitting my DK version of Into the Vortex and I have nearly finished Part 5 of the seven parts. That’s really good, as something exciting arrived in the post today and means I should be able to finish at least one project before starting a new piece of deadline knitting!
You know the routine now, I think. I’m not going to be able to tell you what it is or who it’s for, or show you my progress with it, but I did want to show you the yarn as the colours are so lovely and the shine from the Tencel content is gorgeous.
Speaking of deadline and commission knitting; keep an eye out for the new issue of The Knitter that comes out later this week as I believe it will include a new design from me!
The pastries shown in the pic at the top were from Jusrol from the supermarket that I ‘made’ this afternoon. You just unroll the pastry, spread the cinnamon stuff on, roll up again, slice, bake and drizzle with the icing. Very easy and ideal when you want a pastry and don’t have time to make from scratch or get to a bakers that sell vegan ones. These also happen to be vegan friendly! Perfect for what I needed – you can see I didn’t wait long…
Yarndale preparations are nearly complete, after lots and lots of printing and putting kits together and I have one more delivery arriving today that will be very exciting to reveal at the weekend!
Yesterday’s delivery was more mundane, but very important for my stand set-up: two mops. No, I don’t intend to mop out my pen before setting up my stand; the removable handles will be the supports for my business banner! There is a loop at the top of each handle perfect for a cable tie and I will be able to attach the handles to the rails of the pen with either more cable ties or string (or both). There won’t be a mop head in sight (or even present – as the whole thing comes apart into five pieces, so the mop heads will be staying at home)! I’ll photograph it on Friday as we set up in case you aren’t going to Yarndale and can’t quite picture how it will work.
I did consider broom handles, and also did extensive googling for lengths of wood with pre-drilled holes as I didn’t fancy grappling with Dad’s old Black & Decker drill just before a show, but when I discovered that mop handles tend to have hanging loops at the top (presumably so the mop heads can hang and dry out in between uses) that seemed the way to go. It’s amazing the rabbit holes you can end up going down on the internet when you need to find something very specific that hasn’t been invented for the purpose you need. Funnily enough, the company I bought the banner from don’t sell portable things to suspend said banners from. You might have thought that a search of ‘banner stands’ or ‘frames to hang banners from’ would have produced the solution to my needs, but no! The process of working out what might work and what wouldn’t was quite head spinning and I’m very grateful to all the members of the Yarn Show Vendors group on Facebook who answered my cry for help on how on earth I was going to display my banner. Wonderwool was easy as it could just be hung from hooks over the high temporary walls to the stands and at other events I’ve been able to attach it to the marquee frame (Wool @ J13) or string it between my clothes rails (Pop Up Wool Show), but with the layout I would have at Yarndale that wasn’t going to be an option.
Aside from printing lots of patterns and getting my kits and workshop materials in order, I’ve been doing quite a lot of knitting and some crochet this week. And this time it’s stuff I can show you!
The new sample of Elinor is coming along. I’ve got 20 more rows of the border to do before the edging and I will soon break into the second skein.
These skeins are 1200m, so it’s very very fine laceweight yarn – most laceweight is 800m per skein. I’m wondering whether it will pass the wedding ring test once complete. Very fine lace shawls were said to be able to pass through a wedding ring. however, it will be a big shawl (approx 2m across when complete and my current stitch count is nearing 900 stitches per row), so even with such fine yarn that may not work.
As the rows of Elinor are long and it’s very fine yarn, it’s also been useful to have some knitting on the go that’s easier on the eyeballs. My long loved Manu cardigan, twice mended, has gone under the arms again (despite thorough darning in the past) and I’ve started making a new one. I found some DK yarn in the deep stash which is a bit plumper than the yarn I used previously and I’ve gone up a needle size to keep the fabric supple. I’m not entirely sure the colours are working though. The palest colour (it’s like a lime green in real life) stands out far more than the other shades do. And with the yarn being thicker (and a bit shorter) I’m not sure there’ll be enough for the cardigan at the rate I’m getting through it, even if I leave off the pockets. So, here it is, sitting in temporary time-out while I consider its future.
I will use the yarn, even if not for this cardigan. Maybe I’ll do a Lichfield in colour blocks with the stitch pattern sections in the contrasting colours!?
I’ve woven in the ends of my Mystical Lanterns blanket (apart from the ends of the joining yarn) and it looks very respectable on the back as well as the front now. The left hand pic (with the clear white wavy lines from joining the strips of motifs) is the back.
Last Thursday I was at Yarn O’clock, talking with Anne about patterns that would work well with the new DK Chimera she was expecting from RiverKnits – it’s arrived and you can see it on her social media pages. I remembered that Into the Vortex had originally been written for 50g of the 4ply Chimera and 50g of Nene 4ply (another RiverKnits yarn) and we wondered how the pattern might work knitted in DK on larger needles.
I’ve started an experiment, knitting the first couple of sections of Into the Vortex in John Arbon Knit By Numbers and West Yorkshire Spinners Croft, both of which are DK yarns. I’ve done Parts 1 and 2 on 5.5mm needles (the original 4ply was on 4.5mm) and Part 1 on 5mm needles for comparison. This is because I started on 5.5mm, but the lace section in yellow felt much floppier than the first slipped stitch section in teal, so I’m trying again with 5mm to see if that works better.
It’s probably also due to the character of the two yarns being very different, but I want to see which needle size works best. Once I’ve worked that out and confirmed that the small version of the pattern can be made using 100g of each colour of DK yarn, I’ll add that as an option to the pattern. I’d love to knit one in the DK versions of the original RiverKnits yarns too! I’d forgotten how much fun the vortex shape is to knit as well.
Whilst I was at Yarn O’clock I treated myself to a new book.
Now, Tunisian Crochet is not a technique I’ve tried at all, but it looks really interesting. I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to have a play with it soon. I mean, it’s not like I’m busy or anything, is it…?
That’s all from me for today. If you come to Yarndale at the weekend, please come and say hello! We’re on stand L14. If you can’t make it there, I’ll try to remember to take lots of photos and tell you all about it next week.
…well you could give up, but that isn’t what I do, is it?
Today both I and Floella (my lovely car) have both had to have a second go at something. She needed a new tyre before she could pass her MOT as one of them was bulging(!), and I needed to sort out the spaghetti tangle that my spinning had become. We have both now succeeded!
You’re probably more interested in the spinning (I hope), so I shall tell you what happened. Last week my singles were coming along nicely and I was spinning it all onto one bobbin with the plan to chain ply some of it into a 3-ply structure and bracelet ply the rest as a 2-ply. Chain plying works really well off a single bobbin, and I started to do this, but didn’t love the effect – I wanted the colours to blend and contrast more and for that I needed to ply the yarn either from two bobbins or by using each end of the singles yarn.
Do you remember that when I posted about spinning last week I mentioned I hadn’t done any spinning for a while? I also forgot that winding 100g of yarn around your wrist and middle finger to prep for bracelet plying is a really stupid idea. Three times I rescued my middle finger from the tightening yarn around it before it went completely blue. And then I could barely get it all off my wrist. I’d also forgotten that I’d bought a tool to use instead of wrapping the yarn around my hand back in June…
So, I did eventually get the 100g of singles spun yarn off my hand, but there was no way I was going to be able to get it to hang nicely from my other wrist while I plied it. It crinkled itself into a telephone wire/spaghetti style ball that I tried to ply from with it on my lap, but that didn’t work either. The photo below is just some of it!
The telephone wire nature of the yarn made me think that it probably had too much twist in it as well and I decided to attempt a rescue. The lump of wool had divided itself almost into two so I snapped the yarn and developed a plan. If I could get this mess back onto two bobbins with approximately half on each, then I could try again with the plying. Very slowly I eased the yarn onto the bobbin, turning the wheel in the opposite direction to remove some of the extra twist. I had to keep stopping to undo knots and tangles, but I got there in the end.
After that I went straight into plying the two strands together – still moving in the opposite direction of the first twist (that’s what you do when you ply singles together), which probably removed a little bit more of the original over-twisting.
I’ve actually ended up with a decent looking yarn with exactly the contrasting changing colours in the two strands that I was after. But blimey, it was hard work and I did for a while considering walking away from it as a lost cause. I’m so glad I didn’t though. It was worth trying again and not giving up!
Today hasn’t just been about spinning and visiting the garage though. I have also pressed send on a pattern that will be published in January and submitted another design idea to another publication. These are both exciting things. I’m hoping the submission will be accepted – and if it is that will be another ‘if at first you don’t succeed’ moment, as the designed has been submitted before elsewhere. This time I’ve reworked the idea, re-swatched and I think it’s now a stronger design all round. Sometimes not being successful first time around leads to an even better result at the end!
I can’t show you the new pattern I’ve just sent off or the submission idea, so there isn’t any new knitting to show you this week. I have done some more crochet, returning to my Mystical Lanterns blanket (another great design by Janie Crow). Two more strips of motifs have been added to it this weekend. It’s about half the size recommended in the pattern at the moment. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll make it any bigger than that – there will be enough yarn – or if I’ll make it the size stated and have it as a cosy lap blanket.
Of course I haven’t forgotten about Yarn Gathering on Sunday!
There are daily posts going out on Instagram and Facebook highlighting each of the 17 vendors attending. If you can make it to The Daniel Owen Centre in Mold on Sunday (CH7 1AP), please come along!
Plus, Anne will be opening Yarn O’clock between 12-1pm!
Entry is free, you don’t need to book a ticket, parking in Mold is free on Sundays and you will be able to visit the Mold Food and Drink Festival as well. I’m really excited about co-hosting our third annual Yarn Gathering event with Anne from Yarn O’clock and also being one of the vendors.
If you can’t make it on Sunday, I’ll tell you all about it next week – as well as getting even more exciting about Yarndale at the end of September! Until then, take care and, if at first you don’t succeed… have another go! Kx
