Tag: Baking

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Making and Baking

This weekend I did some baking for the first time in absolutely ages. I made biscuits that are the simplest things ever and they are lovely. The recipe suggested dividing the mixture into three and adding chocolate chips, lemon zest and almonds to get a trio of different flavours, but we just had them plain as we didn’t have any of those extra ingredients, but we did have marg that needed using up as it was near it’s date, flour, sugar and semolina! You can find the recipe here.

I have finally finished my 4-ply version of What Do Points Make?! I decided to make the fourth colour match on each side to be consistent with what I’d done with each of the other colour changes. I used hardly any of the fourth colour, you can see it on the top outer corners – in fact that yarn still weighed over 100g once I’d finished!

The next step is blocking it and I will do that this week – it takes up quite a lot of space on the floor as I will be pinning it out in the shape in the photo above, unless I decide to fold the fronts over while it’s blocking as in the photo below, but then it has double thickness so takes longer to dry.

I had to cancel and postpone a few things last week as my cold took its course, but I’m much better now and looking forward to teaching moebius knitting tomorrow night!

I think I mentioned that I will be teaching both brioche knitting and moebius knitting at the North West Winter Wool Festival in Blackpool next February. The workshops are now available to book and the times are as follows:

  • Two-Colour Brioche Knitting: Saturday 14th February 2026, 1.30-3.30pm (2 hours), £25 including yarn and handouts
  • Moebius Knitting: Sunday 15th February 2026, 1-3.30pm (2.5 hours), £36 including needles, yarn and handouts

I will also add links to these on my Events page of the website. Do remember also that when you book an advance ticket for the North West Winter Wool Festival you will get a code to download the Seaside Winter Cosy hot water bottle cover knitting pattern for free! It can be made in four colours of DK yarn. Two different yarn brands are suggested, but you can use any brand you prefer and there are two finishing option, either to add poppers/press-studs or to seam the bottom edge closed.

When I was invited to take part in Stollen & Wolle once again this year, November 16th seemed a very long way off, but it’s happening in less than 3 weeks! The RiverKnits studio is in a lovely setting in Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire, and last year’s event was super. This year there are eight vendors and the renowned Susan Crawford is a guest speaker, which is even more exciting! If you can get to that area of the country on November 16th I would highly recommend it. Tickets are only £5 with under 16s and carers attending for free, and the lovely RiverKnits folk have requested that you book in advance if you can as it helps their caterers to know how many people to expect.

I had a chance to get right into my baskets in the lounge this week and found a crochet project that had been languishing there for about two years – using yarn that had been in my stash for far longer! I’d done three different squares, trying out a couple of patterns from a book and a pattern I’d found online and left it at that. Now I’ve chosen my favourite one and I’m using it as the centre of what should become a huge granny square. I’ve now had the sense to label the balls of yarn with numbers so I’m not squinting at them in the lamplight trying to work out which shade come next!

That’s all from me for today. What have you been making recently? Take care and I hope you get the chance to do something that makes you happy this week. K x

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This kind of day…!

Today is my lovely wife’s birthday and we have spent the day in Llandudno. We have walked on the beach, found some sea glass, had some food (including lovely vegan ice cream), visited a craft fair and enjoyed some birthday cake.

We avoided most of the rain and have had all our cobwebs blown away by the strong breeze.

I am sure I will sleep like a log tonight!

More knitting content next week. Until then, take care, K x

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Mixing It Up

This has been a very varied week, despite spending quite a lot of time on my own. I even made biscuits, though there are none left and no photographic evidence was taken.

Knitting wise, I have been working on four designs! One, Elinor Hap Shawl, has now been updated with an improved layout and a correction of stitch counts. There will be a further update later in the year once the new sample is ready for photographs.

Another design, Menai, will be launched as an individual pattern next week on April 4th, having been originally published last October in The Knitter magazine. We took advantage of yesterday’s sunshine to take some new photos and I am pleased with how they have come out. It’s a brioche cowl that almost behaves like a mini-poncho and there are some fun decreases to create the leaves and leaf-bud shapes.

I have kept the layout and language consistent with my other brioche designs, so you will see rows labelled as “Row 1 LC (RS):”, followed by “Row 1 DC (RS):” where LC stands for light colour yarn and DC for dark colour yarn, rather than “Row 1 (RS): Using yarn A…” followed by “Row 1 (RS): Using yarn B…” which was the magazine’s house style for brioche.

It’s knitted flat, partly because the alpaca yarn I was using started to make the fabric twist when I tried knitting it in the round, and partly because it’s easier to block properly! The method I use for drawing a blocking schematic varies wildly: sometimes I draw it in a computer programme, and at other times, such as here, I take a very different approach: I print out a photograph of the work while its pinned and blocking, tape it to the window with a plain piece of paper over the top and use that as a free lightbox to trace the outline! To this I can add measurements!

There will be a time limited subscriber discount when Menai is launched for digital copies of the pattern, so if that appeals to you, make sure you sign up to my newsletter before the end of March!

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I will have Menai (both the sample and printed copies of the pattern) with me at the Trunk Show at Yarn O’clock on April 12th. The shop is open 10-4 and I will be there all day with lots of my printed patterns and samples and Anne who runs the shop will be able to show you all the fabulous yarn she has that would be appropriate for the different patterns.

The two other designs I have been working on are new designs that will be published later this year, both single colour items, but very different in yarn weight, technique and finished item! I can’t wait to share them with you.

As well as doing lots of knitting and pattern writing/tweaking, I have been doing quite a bit of singing this week. It was the Spring Market in our town on Saturday and the community choir I lead, Shelby’s Singers, sang for a full hour with songs from Pink, Steps, Les Miserable and Joseph to name just four! The church choir I sing in also had a great rehearsal in the week as we are preparing for performances of Fauré’s Requiem and Allegri’s Miserere just before Easter.

And, surprise surprise, I spent a couple of hours at the garage during the past week (knitting of course) while they checked out my un-opening door. And yes, they did agree after that investigation that it does have wrong with it what I said it did when I booked it in, and they will be ordering the part. I had been foolish enough to think that, having told them the problem had also occurred on a different door nearly 18 months ago and what had been needed, that the part would already have been there and the fault fixed that day, but I was wrong. They needed to check it out for themselves first. Which I suppose is fair enough, but it does mean another wait for it to be fixed.

Then this afternoon, I spent a lovely couple of hours in the company of some ex-colleagues working through a cryptic crossword as we had used to do in the staff room. To be fair I wasn’t a regular member of crossword corner then as I couldn’t often get out of the department during day, but I had always enjoyed the times I did and today was wonderful. Laughter, sharing news, a little reminiscing, but not a lot, and a lot of brain work wrangling our way through the cryptic clues. I will definitely be meeting with them again.

I am looking forward to seeing more of the camellia flowers opening up on the bushes in the back garden – I am hoping they will look quite good by next week and intend to take some photos to share with you. I still need to finish some of the winter cutting back, but I have at least finished the fruit bushes.

I am also looking forward to cooking dinner for my lovely wife this evening, so I had better stop now!

What will you do this week that makes you smile? K x

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An Abundance

Two small metal colanders sit on a bamboo worktop, filled with raspberries. There are a few borage flowers in the one on the left as well.

Yarn Gathering is in less than three weeks! I am excited to tell you that Anne and I did the floor plan at the weekend and there’s going to be a really lovely mix of vendors for you to visit. There will be nine stands in the main hall of the Daniel Owen Centre and three in the cafe space. The cafe itself won’t be open, but you can get refreshments from a variety of places in Mold on a Sunday – or even better, why not visit the Mold Food & Drink Festival while you’re here? There’s a map of the town showing the venue and car parks on the Yarn Gathering page.

One word of caution, especially for the folk who are not from Wales and may be less aware of the upcoming changes in the traffic laws. From 17th September, (nearly) all roads in Wales that were previously 30mph will be 20mph. There will be 30mph signs for any roads that are exceptions to the 20, but the general intention is ‘see street lights, think 20’. I don’t know if traffic police will be issuing fines from ‘Day 1’, but we would hate anyone to get caught out. My town has been one of the 8 trial areas for the 20mph speed limit and there have been very mixed responses from the local community, but it will be happening, starting from Yarn Gathering day, so take it steady on your way to inhale the yarn fumes!

I’ve been baking again!

These are vegan sourdough chocolate brownies and they are truly delicious – especially with vanilla ice-cream and homegrown raspberries. My sister-in-law is coming to visit today, and it seemed an excellent reason to get the baking going again.

Update – Katie loves the brownies and helped pick today’s raspberry harvest.

We’re getting this many every day or two at the moment. Even though they’re autumn fruiting, the canes are really going for it!

Last week when I wrote I was getting to the end of the medium sized sock for my upcoming sock pattern, Bodelwyddan. As you can see, that sock has been finished and the small (second size) sock has also been made! The dark (medium) sock is in RiverKnits Nene 4ply (100% British Bluefaced Leicester Wool) and the light variegated (small) sock is in The Yarn Artist Sock 4ply (75% Superwash Merino, 25% Nylon). Both of these socks were knitted using leftovers from other projects – there wouldn’t be enough for two of each, but who says your socks have to match?!

I’ve also been storming ahead with my own version of Lichfield. This is size 7 and I have finished the back and the left front, and made a start on the right front. As we have a couple of long car trips this week, I may even have finished a sleeve by the time I write next!

Something I forgot to share with you last week was my one purchase at the Pop Up Wool Show.

I bought these two beautiful skeins of 4ply wool from Doulton Border Leicester Yarn. The yarn comes from their own flock and all the sheep live out their full lives, even after their fleeces stop being suitable for use – they have an oap/retired sheep field! I really like their philosophy and the yarn looks and feels very high quality. I don’t know what I’m going to make with it yet, but I have a few ideas up my sleeve!

I’ve been doing a little more crochet recently – what, two crochet projects on the go? Shocking! To the right is my first attempt at puff stitch. Those are the stitches that form the heart in the centre of the granny square. I’m not sure I’ve got it quite right in terms of tension, but I think it’s pretty good for a first attempt! I also decided to treat myself to a crochet blocking board.

This was one of the Amazon images for this crochet blocking board. Can you see what is wrong with it?! 😂

It almost put me off buying it, but at least I could see the pics were of actual crocheted items actually held in place with the metal pins. This was a big improvement on some listings which showed a similar board with badly cropped pictures of crochet overlaid and photoshopped images of the pins floating in mid-air in front of them!

I’m glad I did get it though, it’s decent quality bamboo and metal pins and I like the idea of being able to block several squares at once stacked above each other – guaranteed to be blocked to the same size!

Anyway, that’s all from me for today. Take care of yourselves and I hope you get to do some stuff you enjoy this week. Keep your fingers crossed on the cardigan progress for me! K x

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All Are Welcome

A cross-stitch montage of a wide variety of pride flags and skin tones for a brightly coloured square. Within that the words "Welcome All Races, All Religions, All Sexualities, All Genders, All Nationalities, All Disabilities, All People". A white mount surrounds the stitching with a narrow red frame. The background is a pale gold carpet.

I picked up the Safe Space cross stitch from the framers today! We go to P G Framing in Mold and Paul did a fabulous job as always. I had to request a perspex front because it’s going to be hung in a school and glass isn’t allowed. Taking pictures of things behind a shiny surface is always tricky, so you have a faint reflection of me in the pic too!

On Thursday (that’s the 19th, in two days), the new issue (185) of The Knitter comes out. If everything has gone to plan there should be a pattern in there from me and… an interview! I haven’t seen it yet, and I’m beyond excited. Do let me know if you get a copy!

Do you remember those brownies I hadn’t had time to make last week? They got made on Wednesday and lasted until yesterday! Very squidgy in the middle and particularly delicious with a scoop of vegan vanilla ice-cream. Pictured is the whole bake before cutting and a small corner cut off as soon as it was cool enough (essential for quality control).

Am Byth MKAL began on Friday and I get so excited seeing people share their progress on social media. Part One is fairly quick – I had to put anything that could tell knitters what they were making into Part Two, but it looks cool none the less! It’s also amazing when people say they’ve learnt a new cast-on, a new increase, done some cool baby cables and they’re loving it even though they have no idea what it will be! (Thanks @RobandThread!). Of course, now there’s a fairly long wait until Part Two is released – a whole extra ten days from now!

Here’s a little bit (but not all by any means) of Am Byth Part One, next to the image I designed as the pattern placeholder – can you see a connection? I’ll share my completed Part One next week.

Llandudno Promenade got blocked today. Because of the crocking (excess dye that had transferred to the cream yarn) I didn’t take my usual approach and leave it to soak for 15 minutes (or longer – I have a tendency to forget things if they’re in a different room!). Instead, I immersed it in hand warm water and gave it a good squeeze – to encourage the excess dye molecules into the water – and then repeated this twice more, the last time in colder water and holding the cream sections under the running water. It seems to have done the trick as the blocking photo looks to be less blue in the sections that shouldn’t be blue than the pre-blocking photo did!

Trying to minimise the amount of floor space taken up with blocking (this shawl wasn’t a suitable candidate to try the hap stretcher out on because of the straight edges), I ended up blocking it right side down. It’s not an aggressive block at all – just a case of getting the right angles sides straight and easing out the hypotenuse. Here are the before and after blocking pics:

A series of Knitting for Beginners classes has been booked at Caffi Isa on Monday afternoons (1-3pm), on Feb 6th, 13th and 27th. (Not the 20th as that’s half-term). I did a post about them on Instagram and Facebook on Saturday. If you know anyone who would like to learn to knit, is in Flintshire or Cheshire and is able to come to an afternoon class, please point them in my direction!

I’m also hoping to arrange a series of the same classes on an evening (in Mold) as I know afternoons don’t work for a lot of people.

That’s all from me for today. Have a good week, wrap up warm (Oh, I didn’t even mention the snow!), and do stuff that makes you happy. K x

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Wrapped in Wool

I seem to be increasingly busy lately and I can’t work out whether it’s entirely due to my increased efforts to make my small, one-woman business successful or partly a way of keeping myself away from the news. There are more deadlines certainly – I’ve been submitting designs to publications more frequently and am being accepted more regularly. I’ve even started looking at calls for submissions and thinking “No, I won’t submit to XYZ this time”!

There are self-imposed deadlines too – I mapped out a publications schedule at the beginning of the year with the aim of publishing at least one pattern per month. I’m keeping up with that currently as so far I have (re)published two patterns whose rights have returned to me and published two brand new patterns. The most recent of these was yesterday – Nos Da is now out in the world!

Next month I aim to publish my next Craftucation course (An Introduction to Lace Knitting) and, as that contains a new pattern of mine, I think that will count as my April pattern. This (and the main photo of today’s post) is a screenshot from this morning’s recording, looking at knitted-on edgings.

And June will see two patterns being published by different companies.

I’ve been baking again too. Regular yeasted bread most recently, though I will be returning to the sourdough soon! This was last weekend’s loaf:

Some knitters have recently cast off their Calon Cariad shawls and I joined them last night! It’s lovely to see other people’s shawls and how their yarn choices are working up. Have a look at #CalonCariadKAL on Instagram and Facebook if you want to see them!

Mine ‘just’ needs blocking now. I’m very lucky to have space to do this on blocking mats on the floor, I know. I know people block their shawls on the washing line and weight the lower edge with clothes pegs. Others pin their work out on the bed (I’m sure I’ve even read of the Yarn Harlot doing this on hotel beds in extremis!).

I cast on another project this week too. I know I have about seven on the go already, but the structure of this one was fascinating me and sometimes the only way to really understand something is to do it! It’s the Intro Helmet from Woolly Wormhead, part of her new Introspection collection. The idea is that you can knit any of the six hat styles (Beanie, Beret, Bonnet, Helmet, Pixie and Slouch) with any weight of yarn and in any size! There are loads of crown and brim options for each one too. I’m using some handspun yarn (Colours of Cambria in ‘Mine’, dyed by Katie Weston of Hilltop Cloud) which is working up at about an aran weight. I read through the pattern and the folded brim for the helmet seemed mind-boggling, but once I started making it, it was suddenly started to make sense. I love how the colours are working out too – though that purple band is destined to be on the inside of the hat, unless I wrangle it somehow.

And I’ve dug my colouring pencils out again. I’m playing with options for a knitting design I’m working on. I know the order I want to use the colours in and I’ve been experimenting with the way repeats of the colour sequence might work. It’s a really cool pattern and I’m very excited about it, but you’ll have to wait until September to see this one!

All this making means that some things must have slipped, right? Well, I’m not exactly on top of the dusting and I haven’t yet planted the broad bean or courgette/squash seeds we bought last month, but that’s not a total disaster. Dust only settles behind you as you do it anyway. And there’s still plenty of time for the seeds.

Just don’t ask me to listen to Les Miserables at the moment – that’s more than I can cope with right now. I played some on my laptop accidentally earlier on and had to switch it off, before the keys got wet.

Stay safe and do more of what makes you happy, K x

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It was red and yellow and green and brown and…

This has been a very visually stimulating week for me, so I hope you won’t mind a rather picture filled blog post.

A friend I used to work with in a former life send me a cryptic message a couple of weeks ago: “Look out for a parcel in the post”. I had no idea what to expect. What arrived was this!

Child’s hat, possibly from Peru

There was an accompanying postcard, but all it told me was that my friend was having a sort through her textiles collection and she thought I might like this and that it was ‘authentic’. It is a small hat, for a child, knitted from the top down with ear flaps and knitted to a very tight gauge. The inside shows it was made using the intarsia technique which is perfect for designs with lots of patches of different colours in the same row. However, this technique is usually worked when knitting a flat piece of fabric and I cannot find a seam anywhere on this hat. It must have been knitted in the round. This leaves me puzzled. I contacted my friend to see if she had any more information. She thinks it’s from Peru, but really has forgotten as she’s had it for about 25 years or more. The bright colours were seen as desirable as they were Western chemical dyes. It really is bright – some of the colours are neon and they contrast so strongly with the probably undyed yarn used as the background colour.

I want to do some research into this and find out more about the knitting traditions from Peru and the surrounding areas.

My own colourwork knitting of the Little Orme Cowl has progressed well this week from the tiny circle of knitting I included in my picture on the previous post. It’s going to be super warm as not only is the fabric double layered from being stranded, the cowl is actually a flattened tube so you get four layers of wool between your neck and the icy winds! Ideal for when we can walk up the Little Orme (and the Great Orme) again. It’s always cold at the top! Remember that the mitts pattern is already available – it won’t be long before the cowl is as well.

Little Orme Cowl in progress next to Little Orme Mitts.

I think I’m about halfway round here. Once the knitting is finished I must remember to weave the yarn ends in before I graft the two ends of the tube together or there will be some unsecured ends that I won’t be able to access!

I had two creative successes this week as well. I finished spinning my gorgeous yarn from Anne Murray on Saturday. After letting it sit overnight I plied the two bobbins of ‘singles’ together on Sunday. Monday was skeining and washing and today it is dry. I’m probably biased, but it is a thing of beauty. Anne told me that it would fluff up and bloom after washing and she wasn’t wrong.

The yarn now has a bounce and body that wasn’t there yesterday morning. It also looks more green in real life than I can get the images to show, but either way, I love it! I think it will be the first of my hand spun yarns that I actually knit up as I can’t wait to see how it looks. But what to make?

On the baking front, last week’s sourdough was not great, despite being an improvement on the previous loaf. Yesterday I changed a whole bunch of things at once (which I know isn’t the scientific approach). I fed my starter with rye flour, put the heating on (I know it’s late winter/early spring, but it usually has to be making me shiver before I put the heating on in the daytime), left the starter on the window sill in the sunshine. For the first time ever it doubled in size!

Then more changes: I used 100g of starter instead of 50g, I reduced the water from 350ml to 300ml (along with 500g flour and 10g salt). It was a bit scary at first as I thought the flour was never all going to mix in. But it did. The dough felt and looked just right yesterday evening. I put its shower cap on and let it rest overnight on the counter. The mistake I made was not leaving the shower cap loose as the dough had risen to the top of the bowl and was completely stuck to the underside of it this morning. I finally managed to peel it off, but was a bit concerned I might have wrecked it.

Then, the cold proof in the fridge and the bake. I am delighted! There are still some improvements to be made, but this one is looking far more like a loaf. It’s taking a lot of will power to wait before cutting it open.

Sourdough loaf number four

While I have been doing all these pursuits I have been listening to a new set of audiobooks. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness and read by Jennifer Ikeda is keeping me gripped, and I do like an audiobook that’s over 20 hours long. I’m just a few chapters into the second book of the trilogy at the moment (Shadow of Night) and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

So, I shall put the kettle on, continue knitting the cowl and listen to another chapter.

Stay safe and keep knitting, K x