Category: 2024

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Flying the Shawls

Beth March Shawl, a hand knitted brioche shawl in a cloudy sky forming the shape of a diving sparrowhawk.

Well, last week’s post hasn’t yet united Simon with his mitts and hat – but I live in hope that he will indeed have kept my business card and contact me soon now it’s September.

I realised a while ago that I haven’t done much spinning at all this year, and towards the end of last week I set about putting that right. I chose a lovely vibrant braid of Rambouillet fibre in a colourway called “Lucy” dyed by Sealy MacWheely that I’d bought at Wonderwool Wales in 2023. It reminds me of watermelons and summer. Rather than do anything fancy with it like try to split the braid lengthwise, I just started spinning from the end of the length of fibre and kept going. There isn’t much left to do now! Either I have got faster at spinning or I sat spinning for far longer during the two sessions I used to spin up what’s now on the bobbin than I thought I had. I’m very pleased with how it looks at the moment.

It’s got long blocks of colour at present with some gentle blends at the colour changes. When I get to the plying stage that could change completely depending on which plying technique I choose. If I do a 2-ply and start from the two ends working towards the middle, I could get something quite funky. If I do a 3-ply chain-plied technique the colour blocks will be largely maintained. I’m undecided! Maybe I’ll do half as chain ply and half as a 2-ply and compare the end results!

I’ve been knitting up a storm this week and I’ve used up nearly 200g of 4ply yarn (that’s 800m!) but I can’t show you as it’s a commission. I am really pleased with it and I’m looking forward to seeing it finished and blocked.

It’s a very long time since I went to a gym, but today my body feels just like it used to the day after a big workout! We’ve been trimming the top and sides of the hedge – and it’s very tall – with our pole hedge trimmer. It’s incredibly good at the job, but it’s so heavy! And it’s quite awkward when you basically have to stand with your face in the hedge to reach the very top! It’s getting there though, looking more under control, and we are gradually reclaiming some of the space it had taken from the garden.

If you follow me on social media or subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you will have seen that I have something new and very exciting in stock. Desktop calendars! Bear with me. That may not sound exciting in and of itself, but the pictures really are! When my lovely wife and I photograph my shawls she has long been in the habit of lying on the patio and getting me to throw them in the air above her head. She somehow takes lots of shots while the shawl is in the air and they often create the most amazing shapes!

Sue has been carrying Ronnie and Elastic band desktop calendars in her shop for a while, and she kept saying that a calendar of flying shawls would be just the thing for me! Well, we selected 12 of the best shots that we could also give interesting names to and the finished calendars arrived last week. They are available in my shop and I will also have them with me at Yarn Gathering (Mold, 15th September) and Yarndale (Skipton, 28-29th September).

As an introduction to the calendars, here is the front cover (which is also December), titled “Beth March as ‘Sparrowhawk'” and March, titled “Petulia as ‘Swimmer'”. By coincidence, these both happen to be brioche shawls!

I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am to have a really good wool shop (Yarn O’clock) so close to where I live. Mold is a small market town near me, and it has a great variety of independent shops, including Yarn O’clock. I can think of at least three more proper yarn shops not too far away, each in small North Wales towns (Find Me Knitting in Betws-y-Coed, Ewe Felty Thing in Conwy and Wayfarer Wool Shop in Ruthin).

Today I am visiting Liverpool with my lovely wife, sister-in-law and nephew and, although I don’t need any more yarn in my stash, I decided to look up wool shops in Liverpool. Reader, there aren’t any independent wool shops in Liverpool that show up on Google! There’s the haberdashery in John Lewis and Abakhan in Stafford Street which I may well visit, but I can see nothing else that is an independent ‘destination wool shop’ for a visitor to the city to explore. I imagine the city centre rents are far too high.

Do you have a good wool shop near where you live? If not (and if you are a knitter or crocheter), how do you find quality yarn to work with and discover new brands or hand-dyers? Maybe this is a good time to remind you that we will have 16 amazing vendors at Yarn Gathering in Mold on Sunday 15th September (and Anne will be opening Yarn O’clock between 12-1pm as well that day)?! They are all fairly local to Mold, all being based only an hour or so away. And there will be 201 independent dyers, designers, bag makers and other wonderful folk who work with textiles from all over the country at Yarndale in Skipton on 28-29th September.

That’s all for today – I may have some plied yarn to show you next week! K x

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Desperately Seeking Simon

Three photos. From left: a pair of hand knit mittens in grey brown Herdwick wool, middle: 2 balls of grey brown Herdwick wool, right: a hand knit hat in grey brown Herdwick wool.

It’s an unusual post this week! I’m hoping that the power of the internet and social media can help me out.

At the end of January, at Wool-in Garden City in Welwyn Garden City, I was approached by a chap (Simon) who asked me if I took commissions. I’ll be honest, initially I thought this might be a design commission.

Anyway, it turned out that Simon had bought 2 balls of Herdwick wool a while previously, and wanted them knitted into a pair of mittens and a hat. After hesitating a while as this isn’t the sort of thing I usually say yes to, I agreed. He went home (he lives 10 minutes walk away from the shopping centre in Welwyn Garden City) to get the wool and measure his hands and head and returned promptly. I took the wool and Simon’s hand and head measurements, he took my business card, paid me our agreed fee and I emailed him a receipt through Zettle.

Now, I hadn’t used Zettle a lot by that point. I made an assumption. I assumed that there would be a record of the emailed receipt in my system. There wasn’t. I couldn’t find anything anywhere. So in mid-February, I rang Zettle’s helpline, thinking they would be able to assist. No. They don’t keep a record of the emailed receipts either. This meant I had no way of contacting Simon about his mittens and hat.

What to do? Well, he had said that if he hadn’t heard from me by September he would get in touch. So, I got a simple mitten pattern that I thought should work with the yarn and made the mittens – the gauge was off, so I needed to rejig which size I was making and start again, but one successful pair of mittens was created.

Along with a lot of ‘bits’ of wool – short lengths that were no use for much (apart from maybe saving for darning any future holes). It turned out that something had made itself at home in the balls of wool and had chewed its way through one or two of the plies of the wool in several places! This made part of one ball unusable – and also made me very twitchy. It was almost a relief to find a very dead/long empty case for whichever creature had been living there in the one ball. The other ball was fine. Nevertheless, it went into an airtight ziplock bag after that!

I hadn’t been sure if there would be enough yarn for a hat as well, but Simon had said if possible he wanted a simple skull-cap type hat, and that is what I have made. Being Herdwick, it’s quite firm and not what you’d call soft, but it will keep out the wind and rain!

So, the mittens and hat are completed, but I still can’t contact Simon, who lives 10 minutes walk away from the shopping centre in Welwyn Garden City. I thought I’d found him on Linked In and sent a message, but there was no reply.

If you know a Simon who lives in Welwyn Garden City and commissioned the knitting of a pair of mittens and a hat in Herdwick wool from me in January, please ask him to get in touch. He’s quite tall, white and bald/very closely cropped. The mittens and hat would like to be with the person who paid for them!

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There is a Season

A large rose bed with sweet peas growing up a wooden support.

Each yarn show has its own ‘vibe’, its own season and particular designs that you predict might be popular. The Pop Up Wool Show last Saturday in Port Sunlight is a summer show – and it’s never rained while I’ve been going there – and, as such, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that What Do Points Make? is a popular seller.

The thing that does surprise me a bit is that this garment has been a good seller on all of the three occasions I’ve attended this show! Maybe the fact that I wear this item during the show helps – folk can see how it drapes on a real human. I’m sure the fact that it only takes 1 skein (800m) of lace weight yarn for all except the largest size (shown in blue and purple) is also a big plus! It’s reassuring to me that a knitwear design can be popular for more than just one year.

What Do Points Make? was originally a mystery knit-along for Yarn O’clock and folk had no idea what they were making. The way the garment is constructed (starting at the centre bottom of the back) made several knitters think after knitting Part One that it was going to be a top-down triangular shawl!

I like the fact that there are consistencies when returning to a yarn show. You know how set up works, where everything is, and roughly what to expect during the day/weekend.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that the Pop Up Wool Show was my first ever ‘proper’ yarn show in 2022. I’d had a stall quite often at the local pop up shop before Covid, but that was a general crafts/gifts/small business type pop up shop and not one where the customers were specifically coming for wool related stuff. It’s been really interesting over the past couple of days to look back at the photos from my first stand there in 2022 and comparing it to Saturday’s set-up. I’m quietly proud of how it has developed – though of course several of the designs are still present and correct!

Here’s 2022:

And here is 2024!:

The next show is Yarn Gathering in just under a month, followed by Yarndale just two weeks later. I had thought that Yarndale would be my final show of the year, but there are some more dates sneaking in (!) and when they are confirmed I will add them to my events page on the website. I’m going to be teaching workshops at most of these new events too which is very exciting.

Some yarn arrived yesterday for a commission, with a deadline of (you guessed it) the day after Yarn Gathering. Fortunately I only have to email the pattern to them and not get a knitted sample through the post by that date which does make things simpler. I can’t tell you any more details yet, but it will be out in the world in January 2025.

As the yarn has arrived I have, of course, cast on and started knitting. The pattern is actually already charted out and just needs a written version, including finalising the number of repeats, the yarn usage and measurements – all of which will be confirmed by my actually knitting the item.

Today we had a trip to Bodnant Garden to meet up with some holidaying family members and my lovely wife offered to drive so that I could knit in the car. Very helpful of her and enjoyable for me – and I’ve done an extra 20+ rows that I wouldn’t have been able to have done by now otherwise.

Bodnant was glorious; sunny but not too hot and with lots of plants in flower.

We got there at opening time as well, so it was almost as if we had the place to ourselves at times! The roses smelt heavenly and we now have a new rose on our wish-list – Princess Alexandra of Kent. My photo top right in the block above doesn’t really do it justice.

My car is fixed now by the way. It was so nice to be able to put my foot down a bit on the way home from the garage last week and feel Floella (my car is named after the amazing Floella Benjamin who I idolised on Play School when I was little) react as she should.

Now that I’m knitting a deadline piece I think I will probably have to put the new sample of Elinor Hap Shawl aside for a few weeks. The border is growing, albeit slowly. I’m up to about 880 stitches per row now and I’ve been averaging three rows during two episodes of Silent Witness (we’ve got up to Series 21 now) – that’s about 40 minutes per row. (I don’t knit much slower when I’m not watching telly). Here’s a little section of the border, photographed pinned onto its project bag (I rather like how these colours go together!):

That’s all for today – I’ll get back to you on the progress of the deadline knitting next week!

Take care all, K x

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This Moment

Ronnie, a stuffed toy rhino, flying in the air with blue sky and fluffy white clouds behind him and the tops of trees below him.

Last night we saw about 6 meteors from the Perseid meteor shower over the course of about 30 minutes. It was so lovely to be able to sit in the back garden on our wooden chairs gazing at the sky, randomly pointing and exclaiming, “There’s one!”. There may be more tonight, but as it’s started to rain (and get cooler!) we may not be as lucky seeing them.

It’s been important to grab moments of calm and quiet enjoyment lately as it’s been so busy. We were at the wedding of one of our nephews at the weekend – a beautiful occasion – and I was able to ask Jess, the bride, if she and James had managed to take a few moments during the day to soak it all up. Like we had, she was finding her wedding day was happening more quickly than expected, and I was pleased to hear they had had some time before the buffet to take stock of all the wonderful moments that were making their wedding day an occasion to remember.

We captured moments of the day (and the whole weekend away) in photographs, and some of them are hilarious. These are some of the shots from the wedding – even Ronnie (our rhino) got involved!

It’s also good to put your full focus into experiencing the moment as we did during the ceremony where no photos were taken apart from by the official photographer, and as we did last night looking at the sky and hoping for meteors. Incidentally, This Moment, the title of today’s post, is a beautiful song by Melissa Etheridge, and it just happens to be the song that my lovely wife and I walked out to when we got married. (The chorus begins: “I want to stay here in this moment…”).

Capturing moments sometimes does have to be done by photo or video, especially if you want or need to be able to share it with other people later on. Today I took delivery of a new tool that will help me with making videos and also in my Zoom workshops. It’s the Olivia 2 – a stand to hold your phone horizontally above a surface (and at lots of other angles too), with an adjustable built in light, and it comes with a remote control as well, so you don’t have to make the phone wobble every time you press record, then wait for the shaking of the image to subside before you can actually begin! I had the original version of this phone stand, but I sometimes found it difficult to keep the base out of shot when recording knitting techniques. This updated version has redesigned the construction so the base faces away from you and there is nothing to get in the way of what you are recording, no matter how close up. It’s currently charging up and I’m looking forward to trying it out very soon. I also like how it collapses down into a really compact ‘block’ when you’re not using it. Please excuse the rather busy desk these pics reveal!

So, keep an eye out for more videos going up on my new YouTube channel! And do sign up for my Zoom workshops too:

There are a maximum of 10 spaces on each workshop, to keep it as similar as possible to an in-person workshop, where participants are actively involved and able to ask for help when they need it.

I’ve finished the central square of my new same of Elinor Hap Shawl and am part-way through picking up the stitches for the border – with such fine yarn I had to recount/redo the first side this morning with proper light. I am determined to get all the stitches picked up and on the needles today so that when I am sitting at the garage (again) tomorrow while they fix the car’s judder and lack of ability to accelerate properly (it wasn’t just the spark plugs, apparently the car needs a new ‘coil pack’) I will be able to work on the border.

With this pattern, the central square doesn’t have slip stitch edges and stitches are picked up from the very edge of the garter stitch border. It’s quite a tricky process, added to which there are regular points where you ‘pick up and kfb’, so knitting into the edge twice in the same place to create extra stitches. I might use my new gadget to help record this process this evening!

Because my car was not in the best of health last weekend I got to be a passenger on the way to the wedding and socks happened! Well, one and a half socks, which is still pretty good for a weekend with lots of other things in it! DK yarn and 3mm needles make them grow nice and quickly. The finished sock just needs to be grafted at the toe, but I forgot to take a darning/tapestry needle with me on the trip. The second sock on the right is partway through the gusset. The pattern is Bob (Friend of Dave) by Rachel Coopey and the yarn is Socks Yeah DK from CoopKnits (also Rachel Coopey). I’ve made this pattern quite a few times now, and this time I included my usual reinforced slip stitch pattern on the heel flap.

The final thing I want to tell you about today is very exciting. I have finally got my Barragán wrap pattern online (on ravelry, Payhip and my website – and Lovecrafts once it’s gone through all the approvals there) and I’ve printed out 20 copies ready for the Pop Up Wool Show on Saturday – hurray! So, if you can’t get to the Pop Up Wool Show, you can get yourself a copy online.

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Piece by Piece

Since spending four or five days at Mum’s last week going through ‘the fabric’ and many many other things in the middle of a heatwave, then the next four days photographing and listing many (but not yet all) of the things we brought back onto eBay and Vinted, I feel a little boggled.

One box contained just silk. Now, you probably know that I’m plant-based and I don’t use silk in my knitting, so I’m not going to be using silk fabric to sew with. And there was a lot. If you get the ‘featured photo’ at the top of the post (I know some people don’t see it if they receive the blog by email), that set of three pics is just some of it! There were some factory offcuts from Beckford Silk, lots of post-project offcuts, some whole pieces, one of which was 3m long! I’ve separated them out by size of pieces, bagged them up and listed most of them on eBay. There are some bargains to be had if you like using silk, especially if you like using small pieces!

Did you know you can search by seller on eBay? On the left-hand panel the categories and search filters are listed. If you scroll to the bottom, there’s a ‘More filters’ option. When you click on that a pop-up box appears and one of the selections is ‘Seller’. Select ‘include’ and type in the seller’s username. I’m “knitting33”.

You’ll find a host of other things too, including 7 or 8 Wentworth jigsaws and some Prinknash pottery!

I did go through the three large boxes of patchwork fabric and wadding and managed to organise the fabric by colour. This was partly so it would be easier to work out what I would like to keep or not, and partly so I could find three pieces of fabric to take to a Beginners’ Patchwork class on Saturday! As Mum said last week, “If you’re going to take all that fabric and keep some of it, you’d better learn how to do patchwork!” and she paid for me to go to a Jo Paloma Makes workshop at Amanda’s Fabrics in Mold. Last summer I quilted some placemats that Mum had already made the tops for, but apart from sewing some little hexagons together by hand over paper templates, I’ve not done the actual patchwork before.

Well, Jo is an amazing teacher. I learnt how to make pouch bags at one of her workshops. And she was very thorough, clear and encouraging throughout the four-hour workshop, which quite honestly flew by. We learnt all about the equipment needed and how to use it, whether we were left- or right-handed. I was really pleased that in a class with four students we were equally split between the lefties and righties! I’m usually the only one!

We made a nine patch, photographed it and then cut it up to make a disappearing nine patch. The idea of cutting up the piece that we’d just so carefully measured, sewn together and pressed made me feel for the students of my steeking workshops. That’s where we knit something, reinforce the area we are going to cut, and then take our scissors to our knitting! I had a little of the “But I’ve just made that” feeling that they get! It was worth it though, because the final piece is very pleasing and so different from the basic nine patch!

I can now understand why quite a few of the ‘fat quarters’ in Mum’s stash only had a small corner taken out – it was for the single square in the middle!

One of my friends said to me on the phone yesterday, “How do you have time for patchwork?”, and he may well have a point, what with the day job of designing and knitting, the crochet, spinning, embroidery and lace-making (the last few of which to be fair, I haven’t done much of this year), let alone the occasional baking and trying to keep on top of the garden, but we’ll see.

However, I have done some more on my new sample of Elinor Hap Shawl, and I’m just over two thirds of the way through the centre square! On current progress I should be on the border by next week, if all goes well. I do seem to be having a green phase…

I am starting to get everything ready for the Pop Up Wool Show in Port Sunlight on August 17th, 10-4pm. It’s a lovely show and if you’re anywhere near the north west I thoroughly encourage you to come. Tickets are £4 and are available on the door. The image lower right is my stand at last year’s show.

I will have my Barragán shawl pattern with me for the first time, the whole Bargello Aurora Collection, and copies of most of my other designs! As I currently have 60+ designs in my portfolio I can’t bring all of them, but if you are coming to the show and there’s a particular pattern you would like to see, let me know and I’ll make sure to bring it with me.

And then, only four weeks after the Pop Up Wool Show, is our own Yarn Gathering! I can’t stress enough how exciting it is to be bringing this little yarn event to Mold again for its third year. Anne from Yarn O’clock and I were so pleased when we had a flurry of ‘new-to-Yarn-Gathering’ folk asking if they could apply to exhibit with us, all of whom were near to Mold and some folk who we recently discovered and invited, and that is why we expanded into an extra room. Do make the effort to come upstairs if you can – I’ll be one of the exhibitors up there!

16 vendors is still small in the grand scheme of things (the Pop Up Wool Show has 28 this year, Buxton Wool Gathering was about 50, Yarndale will be 201 – yes, I counted them!), but Yarn Gathering is steadily building and it’s great that people want to come back year on year.

All our vendors will be travelling approximately an hour or less to get to Yarn Gathering in Mold (in some cases, only a few minutes!), so we really are showcasing local talent! And, it’s free entry!

There are no refreshments available at the event, but as the Mold Food & Drink Festival is happening during the same weekend, we don’t think you’ll go hungry or thirsty!

There’s lots happening during the rest of this week and I’ll tell you all about it next Tuesday. Until then, do some stuff that makes you happy, and stay safe. K x

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Melting

The centre square of Elinor is nearly halfway done! The yarn is working up nicely, although I had to switch from using the yarn from the centre of the ‘cake’ to the outside as it kept snarling up and getting in a massive tangle as I pulled the strand of yarn from the centre. 

There has been slower progress in the last couple of days – I’ve only done 4 rows – as we’re down at Mum’s doing the most enormous sort through of some of her stuff; fabric, garden tools and clearing out cupboards in the garage that haven’t been opened in years. That hasn’t left much time or energy left for lace knitting, especially as it’s so hot it feels like we’re melting! I’m typing on the iPad today, so I’ll add links into the post in a couple of days when I’m back with my laptop.

If you’re on social media, you may have seen that on Saturday I launched a YouTube channel! There are currently 10 videos on there that are also on my website as free tutorial videos – and I’m hoping that, as YouTube is the go-to place for many people, these videos will have the opportunity to reach a wider audience than if they are just on my own website. There will be more added to the channel, including a look at my design process and introductions to some of my designs.

Bargello Aurora Wrap, Cowl & Scarf is now live! Yesterday I did a post about why you might choose to knit the wrap and there will be posts later in the week about the benefits of choosing to knit the cowl or the scarf.

My complete pattern for Barragán is very nearly ready. It was originally published as a four part knit-along in The Knitter between September and December last year, using two colours of McIntosh BFL 4ply.

I’m adding in the needle size that the wrap/shawl was originally designed with (3.25mm), which uses 161g of each of the two colours of 4ply yarn. When the pattern was published in the magazine it was accompanied by a subscription offer of 150g of each colour of the yarn for the shawl, so I had to reduce the needle size to 3mm to reduce the tension and therefore the quantity of yarn required. Even with the reduced needle size it was a little ’tight’ on yarn, and I certainly know of one knitter who ran out as their personal knitting tension was fractionally looser than mine, even though the 150g subscription skeins were on the generous side and actually weighed a little more than 150g. See? Tension again – it really does matter!

Therefore, whilst I am also retaining the smaller needles and lower yarn quantities as an option in the pattern, I am strongly recommending that if you do have 200g of each colour of yarn, to use the larger needle size and have a relaxing time knitting. Or, if you only have 150g of each colour, to use the smaller needles and to also follow the newly added instructions for making Part Three of the shawl shorter by working one less repeat of the stitch pattern. That way, a knitter can create a completed shawl with the available yarn without the fear of ‘yarn chicken’.

McIntosh will be offering Barragán shawl kits with 200g of each colour from here on, but I wanted to keep the lower yarn quantity in the pattern as an option in case anyone is gifted the yarn from the subscription offer.

My next yarn show is in just a couple of weeks! The Pop-Up Wool Show is a 1 day event, on 17th August, 10am-4pm. The show is held in a beautiful building, Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, which is only a stone’s throw from The Lady Lever Art Gallery. You could visit both! Entry to the Pop-Up Wool Show costs £4 and tickets are available on the door as well as in advance. It’s always a great show, so if you can make it over to Port Sunlight on August 17th, please come and say hello!

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Smiling

We spent last week in Kent visiting friends and family and the week culminated in going to see The Manic Street Preachers / Suede at Dreamland in Margate. It was very good, and you can read more about it (along with a fantastic Ronnie photo) over on my lovely wife’s blog, Singing as the Darkness Lifts and see why James Dean Bradfield shouted a “Thank you!” to us. She does an audio version too!

I had finished knitting my Bargello Aurora scarf before we left for Kent and I blocked it the day we got home. Yesterday it was ready for me to remove the pins and finish the ends off. I’m very pleased with it and I’m looking forward to taking some photos of it on Daisy (one of my dress form mannequins) later on today to add to the pattern.

The updated pattern will go live on all my platforms (Ravelry, Payhip, Lovecrafts and my website) on Friday, so you only have to wait three more days.

Since we got home I’ve also woven in all the ends on my Persian Tiles Blanket, designed by Janie Crow. It does need a final wash to allow the border and seams to relax and lie flatter, and I’m watching the weather forecast carefully to choose a consistently dry day to do this so it can dry outside.

This project has had so much attention on Twitter every time I’ve posted about it. I can only hope that one day one of my own designs will be admired as much!

My new Elinor Hap Shawl sample is steadily growing. I’ve done three and a half pattern repeats of the 15 that make up the centre square so far. I’m enjoying knitting this one again and the finer lace weight yarn is giving a really soft fabric It’s rather wide with 191 stitches in this section, but then there’s just the border and the edging. The whole shawl uses traditional lace stitch patterns. The stitch pattern in the centre square is called Smiling Diamonds – once it’s been blocked you’ll be able to see why more easily!

For a while now I’ve been planning to run some Zoom Workshops and yesterday I finally booked them in! All workshops are 2 hours long, running from 7-9pm (British Summer Time/GMT+1) and cost £25 per person. I’ve put a 10-person limit on each the workshops so that people can interact and get the most out of it.

Zoom Workshops currently available are:

Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Knitting – Tuesday 8th October

Fair Isle (Stranded) Knitting – Saturday 12th October

Next Steps in Two-Colour Brioche Knitting – Tuesday 22nd October

I’ll be adding these workshops to the Events page on my website later. The links above go straight to the relevant TicketSource page where you can see all the details and book a place if you wish.

I’ve been thinking about swatching a lot lately and have been doing quite a bit of it too.

Swatching as a designer is like playing and I love it. During our week away I had my squared paper and pencil out along with my needles and yarn, and knitted 7 different swatches around an idea I had until I finally cracked it with the 8th swatch. It wasn’t a random idea; I’m working on a submission for publication and there is a brief – techniques to include and a level of difficulty to provide, as well as specific yarns/colours they’re looking to use. I’ll be drawing up the submission document this week and I really hope it’s accepted. Of course, as these swatches are for a design submission I can’t show them to you, but I did enjoy making them and tweaking the idea until I got to the Goldilocks ‘just right’ moment.

The other type of swatching I’ve been thinking about is tension swatching. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but a knitter’s claim that they ‘always knit to tension’ and therefore don’t need to swatch before starting a project is so strange to me. They might generally turn out the ‘recommended tension’ on a yarn ball band, but that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to a pattern.

The pattern tension is the designer’s or sample knitter’s tension – it’s the number of stitches and rows that they got across 10cm/4in when working a specific stitch pattern on a specific needle. Any two knitters given the same needles and the same yarn are highly likely to knit to a different tension – sometimes wildly different. Even a small difference adds up over a larger piece of knitting and can even result in a knitter running out of yarn if they were unaware their tension was looser than that in the pattern, as it creates a larger finished item which inevitably uses more yarn.

Here are two swatches knitted by different people using the same yarn and needle size. The swatches themselves are different sizes because a different number of stitches were cast on and a different number of rows were knitted. It’s the size of the stitches themselves that is important.

I can see they look different, but perhaps not very different. It’s only the stocking stitch sections that will be measured – the borders are just to help the swatches lie flat and not curl up.

When measured the smaller swatch has 24.5 sts x 34 rows over 10cm and the larger swatch has 23.5 sts x 33.5 rows over 10cm. That sounds very similar, doesn’t it? It’ll be fine, won’t it? Not necessarily. Scale it up. Say it was for something that has 500 stitches. For the knitter of the smaller swatch that fabric would be 204cm wide, but for the knitter of the larger swatch the same number of stitches would be nearly 213cm wide. That’s a difference of 9cm in the finished items for the same number of stitches!

What’s the solution? It’s easy! Knit a tension swatch in the given stitch pattern and needle size (make it 12-15cm in each direction). Wash it and dry flat, or block more firmly with pins if the pattern says to. Then measure 10cm across the stitches and count them, and measure again down the rows and count them. Compare these numbers to the tension given in the pattern. If you get fewer stitches than the pattern tension states your tension is looser, so try again with a smaller needle. If you get more stitches your tension is tighter, so try again with a bigger needle. Wash and dry this new swatch and measure it. Stitch gauge (tension) is more important than row gauge as it’s harder to adjust around. Patterns often say “continue in pattern as set for another XX rows or until work measures XX cm”. This allows a knitter to adjust the number of rows worked if necessary to achieve the right length – this is much easier to do than adjusting the number of stitches.

So many knitters refuse to take the step of knitting and measuring a tension swatch, saying it’s a waste of time, but surely it’s more of a waste of time (and money) to knit a whole garment that doesn’t fit you, or to run out of yarn just before you finish (if your tension is looser) and then have to buy another ball/skein (if you can find it still for sale)? If you’re a knitter who is reluctant to swatch before a project, please give it a go! You might find it saves you time and money in the long run – and who wouldn’t appreciate that?

That’s all from me for today. Take care and do something that makes you smile this week. K x

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Sock it to ‘em

One good thing about being the passenger on a long car journey is that there is plenty of knitting time. And so I have finally finished Sue’s socks that I began while we were at Wonderwool in April. The variegations in the yarn (dyed by Weku Yarn) are very striking and the pooling shifts in unpredictable ways, giving a dynamic effect. It does mean that the texture of the sock pattern gets a little lost unless you are close up, but Sue assures me that they are very comfortable and she loves them. I used my Bodelwyddan sock pattern, making the fourth size of five.

I cut out 7 rounds of the foot before the toe, following my own instructions: “Cont as set, working through Rnds 1-10 of Leg Patt for another 37 (40:42:45:42) rnds, or until sock is 4 (41⁄2:5:51⁄2:6) cm shorter than wearer’s foot from heel to big toe. Check for fit if possible.” The highlighted numbers just show the size I was making.

it really is important to check for fit on the foot length as the size made is chosen by leg circumference (with potential for shifting between sizes on the foot). The length suggested is the ‘standard’ length for each circumference, but who is standard? We’re all different and that’s what makes hand knit socks special – they have the capacity to fit the wearer perfectly.

Last week I was anticipating having a new design out in Issue 204 of The Knitter and I was a bit disappointed when it wasn’t there! However, I have since found out that it’s been held back to Issue 207 for a very lovely reason, so in three month’s time, I shall be able to tell you all about it!

So, my update to Bargello Aurora is ready, and I just need to get photos of the blocked scarf into the pattern before it can be published. Another design of my that is getting an update is Elinor Hap Shawl. This is the ‘sister’ pattern to Marianne Half Hap and I’m enjoying knitting up a new sample for it as well as thinking about ways to improve the layout of the written pattern and charts.

I’m using a particularly fine lace weight for this sample. It’s Ripples Crafts Knockan Laceweight in ‘A Slice of Lime’, a 100% merino wool with 1200m per 100g. Let of the laceweight yarn I’ve used before has been 800m per 100g, so this is superfine, but it does mean I only need 2 skeins for the whole shawl, rather than 3! The pattern will list the length of yarn used as well, so. If you have laceweight yarn that comes in 50g skeins you’ll be able to be as precise as possible when deciding how many are needed for this shawl.

I have finished my Persian Tiles blanket! This photo is not the finished article, but it is the most recent photo I can show you.

There are six rounds of border all the way around the blanket as well now. I do need to weave in all the ends from the seaming and the border and give it a final block (simply hand wash gently and dry it flat). One of the octagons has its red and orange petals facing the wrong way – B2 if you look at it like a map reference – but as many lovely folk have said on social media it gives it character, makes it unique and is a good reminder that nothing is perfect! I really enjoyed making this blanket and if you fancy doing some crochet from a very well written pattern I highly recommend anything by Janie Crow who designed this.


You may have noticed a new tab on my website. “Supporting Small!” is a new initiative from Amanda who owns Moorlands Wool and Crafts, a lovely yarn shop in Leek, Staffordshire, who I met last year. Supporting Small! is a way of supporting other small businesses, indie makers & dyers, celebrating their individuality & craftmanship, to create a vibrant & diverse craft community.
By having a page on our websites we can highlight to our customers other small businesses who are involved who we think are great and who they may not have come across before. So far I just have links and info for Moorlands Wool and Crafts and Yarn Barf, an indie dyer who specialises in really vibrant colours. It’s a reciprocal scheme so you’ll find a link to my website on each of their Supporting Small! pages as well. There will be more added soon as I start to spread the word among my contacts nearer home.

Speaking of things nearer home, did you know it’s less than 9 weeks until Yarn Gathering? We have 16 vendors this year, including 6 vendors who are new to Yarn Gathering this year!

Our confirmed vendors for 2024 are:

Cefn Llan Fibre Flock, Gwennol Designer Handknits, Idris Emporium, Jenny’s Crafts, Kath Andrews Designs, Lottieknits, Penny Stitch Craft, Sheep Floof, SKD Yarns, The Soggy Kookaburra, The Woolly Tangle, The Yarn Artist, Trevor Blackburn, Under an English Sky, Weki Wool, Wild Field Fibre

The date for your diary is 15th September 2024, 10am-4pm at The Daniel Owen Centre in Mold, CH7 1AP. Entry is FREE and no ticket is required.
As Yarn Gathering takes place on a Sunday, parking in town is also free and there is a car park next to the venue with some spaces for Blue Badge holders.

There will be four vendors upstairs. If you cannot access the stairs we will do our best to ensure you can see what is on offer upstairs via video and any items you wish to see will be brought down for your consideration.

The Mold Food & Drink Festival also takes place the same weekend as Yarn Gathering and we encourage you t visit this event too while you are here. It will mean that one of the town car parks is out of use as that is where the Food Festival is based. This can be seen clearly on the map on the Yarn Gathering page.

That’s all from me for today. Have a good week and I hope to show you lots of progress on Elinor next week! K x

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Bryn – in a tin!

Well, Wool@J13 (that’s ‘Wool at Junction 13’ as it’s near Junction 13 of the M6, sometimes referred to as ‘Woolly J’) is done and we are home. I still need to go through all the samples and check if anything needs freshening up with a re-block or just folding in a different way, but everything else is back where it should be.

I know I’ve said this before, but Wool@J13 is a very different kind of yarn show. First of all, it’s in a field and the parking is in a different field down the road. Most of the vendors are in the ‘shop til you drop’ marquee that is a bit like a circus tent with its yellow and white stripes, with others in individual gazebos in the ‘gazebo village’. There are also two tents for workshops. So far, so yarn show, just with a slightly different setting.

Here’s my stand in the marquee, with Sue wearing her ‘Add value, bring joy’ T-shirt. She did, and does, every day!

Then as well as the marquee and gazebo village, there’s a small stage tent, with plenty of chairs and tables arranged in front of it. Throughout the weekend there’s live entertainment and you can sit and enjoy that as you eat your lunch from one of the street food vendors, or just soak up the music as you go round the stands. Last year Jo from Second City Yarns also entertained us inside the marquee with her cello playing. However, this year she had a broken finger, so couldn’t play. Ingrid (who it is almost impossible to say no to!) asked what instrument I played, and when I told her that I mostly sing, and yes, I did sing a cappella (unaccompanied) sometimes, asked if I’d like to do a turn in the marquee? I said yes! So, on Sunday afternoon when it wasn’t too busy and wouldn’t be interrupting too many potential sales, Ingrid gently blew her whistle, and I sang Misty and Unforgettable. It wasn’t until afterwards that I told her I hadn’t sung a solo in public in about 7 years…! I did enjoy it and there’s a short clip of the end of Misty floating about somewhere on Facebook if you want to see the evidence.

Bryn, my new brioche cowl designed especially for first time brioche knitters (or, as Tamsin from The Left Hookery put it, ‘brioche virgins’…!) , was well received and the kit, forever now to be known as ‘Bryn in a Tin’, sold well. The blues colourway was particularly popular.

I will be putting this kit and several others on to the website in the next few days, so if you want one, but can’t get to a yarn show, you can order online!

I had a nice surprise yesterday. I received an email telling me I had a Payhip review and clicked on it to see the details. It was a super review from someone who had bought the Pride and Progress Pride Knitting Kit bundle:

Cute kit – perfectly packaged!

A great kit for a beginner, or someone who wants to make a Pride flag without investing in massive balls of yarn. You got plenty of yarn and great instructions all packed in an enveloped that fitted through the letter box. I made my first flag straight away! – Nessa H.

That wasn’t the only surprise though. I also discovered there were nine other Payhip reviews (all 5 star) waiting to be moderated and published! So, now if someone has reviewed a pattern or kit on Payhip, the review is there on the product page for folk to see, and I’ve selected a few for testimonials at the bottom of my main Payhip shop page. I’m not sure how I didn’t know the reviews were sitting there – some are a year old! But I’m so glad to have found them and to know that folk are enjoying what I do.

Speaking of folk enjoying my work… If you get my newsletter or have seen my social media posts at the weekend, you’ll know that I saw some of my designs ‘in the wild’ at the weekend. It’s always such a buzz, especially when the knitter tells you they’ve really enjoyed knitting the project and that the pattern was clear and really easy to follow. I mean, that’s what I always aim for, but until someone tells you that that WAS their experience, you don’t really know for sure. From the left the patterns are: What Do Points Make?, Meg March Shawl and Branwen Shawl.

My Persian Tiles blanket is making progress – I only have 9 more motifs to finish off with the last two rounds now (that’s about three evenings worth)! Then I need to block them and put it all together. Can you see the different from last week? I am glad I followed Jane Crowfoot’s recommendation to make them ‘production line’ style as you can memorise the round you are working on easily and just repeat it, and you don’t have to keep getting a different coloured ball of wool out.

I’ve made a little progress with my Bargello Scarf. It’s less than I’d intended, and I think that’s because finishing each of the crochet motifs is so addictive! I am however, nearly at the halfway point now.

I am really looking forward to being able to photograph all three samples (the wrap, cowl and scarf) together as a set, ready for the relaunch of the pattern. It’s going to look so dramatic!

I also got a bit more of Sue’s sock done while we were away. Socks are the perfect travel knitting, as they take up so little room – and that was an important consideration with the car being so full of stuff for the show. I will definitely be on at least the second sock by the time of the next show (Pop Up Wool Show on August 18th), even if I haven’t finished them by then. I’m using my Bodelwyddan pattern, making the 4th size.

Plans for Yarn Gathering 2024 are coming on well. It’s being held on Sunday September 15th, from 10am -4pm.

You will be pleased to know that entry to the event is still FREE, and once again it is happening at the same time as the Mold Food and Drink Festival, so you can combine visiting the two events! And as it’s on Sunday, there are no parking charges in Mold!

We will have more vendors than ever this year – 16 or 17 – and because of that we are expanding into more of the Daniel Owen Centre.

We have previously used the main hall and the cafe space. This year we are using those two areas again, and are also using the largest of the upstairs rooms. We know that stairs aren’t great for everyone, but (as someone who has bungalow legs myself and isn’t great with stairs) I can say that they are decent stairs. The treads are deep enough to get your foot on, the steps themselves are not too high, and there are sturdy handrails on both sides. If you can’t access the first floor at all, we can take a video to show you what is up there and bring down things you particularly want to see.

Yarn Gathering now has its own Facebook page as well as an Instagram account, and we will be posting about each of our lovely vendors – who are all still fairly local – leading up to the event. Do come – we’re sure you’ll enjoy it.

That’s all from me today. I was going to pick the blackcurrants or do some weeding in the front garden, but it’s raining (again!) so that can wait. Take care and have a good week, K x

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Flowers and Stars

Last week I promised I would show you my progress with my Persian Tiles Blanket, designed by Jane Crowfoot and my Bargello Aurora Scarf. I’m quite pleased with both.

The large motifs for the blanket are on their final three rounds.

One of these 16 motifs is complete – that’s the one I made first and one to the left of it has a dark blue round with stitches of different heights that changes it from a flower / star to an octagon. I hope to have completed this round on all the other 14 motifs by next week and perhaps have begun the cream round with the stitches that cross over each other – that’s the hardest bit in my opinion.

As for the Bargello Aurora Scarf, I’m just over a third of the way through it! It probably could have been more, but since I got home from my *second* trip to the midlands last week (it was planned, but it was a lot of driving), I’ve been crocheting in the evenings instead.

There will be nine blocks of the stripe pattern repeat in total. Yesterday I wrangled with inkscape, a programme I use for drawing .svg files for schematics. I don’t use it very often, so remembering how to move nodes (the points where the lines change direction) etc and edit files took longer than I would have liked, but I do now have schematics for the cowl and the scarf as well as the wrap.

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I won’t have copies of the updated Bargello Aurora pattern with me at Wool@J13 this weekend as I want to finish the scarf sample first and double check the measurements and yarn quantities used, but I will have it at the Pop Up Wool Show in Port Sunlight on August 18th and it will hopefully be available online before then as well.

There will be new designs and new kits at Wool@J13 though! Leaf & Vine has returned to me as I told you last week and I will have printed copies of that, the new brioche cowl (now named Bryn!) will be there in both printed pattern and kit form (with kits comprising the pattern, yarn and a stitch marker in a tin), and the pride kits will be there with the same bundle offer as online.

The Bryn Brioche Cowl kits all contain the same amount of yarn, allowing you to simply choose your colours and then decide which size you want to make.

That’s quite a few items having their first show outing! I was going through my inventory list and as well as these ‘brand new to shows’ designs, there will be about 20 other products that I didn’t have with me last year at Wool@J13, including patterns, kits, postcards and hand-spun yarn. I just hope I can fit it all into my car and then into my stand space! (Barragán will be making its show debut at the Pop Up Wool Show).

I have a new brioche knitting workshop coming up in a couple of weeks! Next Steps in Two-Colour Brioche Knitting is ideal for knitters who have learnt the basic two-colour brioche stitch and now want to explore the technique further. Knitters will create this amazing swatch, learning increases and decreases that will open up a whole range of brioche knitting patterns.

The workshop is being held at Shaz’s Shabby Chic in Buckley on July 10th, 6.30-8.30 and the full details can be found on my events page as well as on ticketsource where you can book a workshop place.

I will also be running this workshop AND my Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Knitting workshop as online Zoom events later in the year, so keep your eyes peeled for those if this is a knitting technique you’d like to explore, but you can’t get to North Wales (or to Yarndale in North Yorkshire, where I am teaching Introduction to Two-Colour Brioche Knitting on Saturday 28th September – there are just 3 spaces left on the Yarndale workshop).

I haven’t been at home much this week with the double trip to the midlands, but we have been able to get into the garden this weekend. There has been some serious pruning of the box at the bottom of the garden (it was almost twice as tall as us!) and we’ve even trimmed the hedge! Well, some of it. We couldn’t get right down to the bottom because the box was in the way, but now that’s been brought back under control we’ll be able to finish the hedge off. This is the hedge that acts as a backdrop for many of my photos of knitting when it’s modelled on a human! Our neighbour used to cut our side every year while we were away in the summer, but since he died (quite a number of years ago now), we’ve had someone in to do it twice, but it hasn’t been enough – and we felt it used to get more of a tickle than a prune anyway. I reckon we’ve lost at least two feet of garden to the hedge, judging from how much it came in front of the bottom garage window. So, we bit the bullet and bought a pole hedge trimmer. We took off about a foot from the width of the hedge on Sunday, but we still need to remove more. We are being very careful – gloves, proper shoes and so on. This pic gives some idea of how much the hedge has overgrown – that’s after we trimmed a foot or so off (and bevelled the corner to get more light into the garage)!

The veg has been very poor this year, with everything apart from a few kale plants having been eaten by slugs or snails. However the fruit bushes are looking mighty fine, and the blackcurrants are ready to be picked!

Jam making time is coming near. Maybe after the weekend?

That’s all from me today. The next time I write it will be July! Which reminds me, if you’d like to receive exclusive discount codes and more, then do sign up for my monthly newsletter, which comes out at the start of each month.

Take care one and all, K x