Tag: lace knitting

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Mysterious Girl

Last week I met someone in the main car park of my little town and exchanged two jars of homemade preserves (blackcurrant jam and seville marmalade) for a large and very full black bin liner. It sounds very mysterious, doesn’t it?

The bag has since been sitting in my study as the other parts of my life have taken on some deadlines (more later) and I haven’t yet been able to play with the contents. But it keeps reminding me it’s there and every time I take a peek inside I get excited.

So, what on earth did I swap for jam and marmalade?

A black bin liner has its top rolled open to show it is full of freshly sheared sheep fleece

A fleece. A whole one, from a sheep named Doris. Here are her before and after shots!

She is currently Mandy’s only sheep and, knowing I have taken up spinning, she asked if I would like it. Oh, yes please! It’s completely unprocessed and Mandy and her hubby sheared Doris themselves. Doris is a very clean sheep so there are not too many bits in it. So, I have a new learning curve to go on. Having washed a few locks of fleece is somewhat different to this type of quantity, but I have some notes and I will do some more research. A fine day on the patio seems like a good starting point. I did learn from the tv last night that any remaining less spinable parts of a fleece are excellent for rhubarb – Mandy mentioned this too as being generally good for homegrown fruit etc.

So what kept me away from Doris’ fleece? Well, I have submitted two (yes, two!) designs to a magazine I haven’t worked with before (deadline is next week, but, as you know, I don’t like to get too close to deadlines). Fingers crossed!

Also, I have finished my latest shawl design which I showed you last week and it’s going to be published in the next couple of weeks. It also now has a name – Angel of the North. See if you can tell why:

Finally, the MKAL I have been working on in conjunction with Yarn O’clock begins in 2 weeks!! It is in 7 parts, beginning on July 2nd and each part will be released weekly on Fridays. Because we like to keep you guessing, we’re not even saying what item the mystery knit will become, but you do need to know that for this one we are using Riverknits Chimera and 50g of Nene, both British Bluefaced Leicester 4ply and hand dyed in Northamptonshire (or 50g each of a multicoloured 4ply with a contrasting solid/semisolid one). Yarn kits are available for £25 from Yarn O’clock or you can buy the pattern on its own for £5.00 from me. The needles you will need are 4.5mm (60cm circular or 30cm straight).

An image of a simplified vortex in shades of blue with the Yarn O'clock logo in the bottom left corner and "Into the Vortex, MKAL by Kath Andrews" in the top right. This is the image placeholder for the pattern while the MKAL is running.
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Tea and Toast

Well, this week has seen me doing a lot of knitting and there’s so much of it that I can’t show you! The next MKAL with Yarn O’clock is developing well and I’ve been working on a swatch for a new submission (which I’m tentatively quite excited about).

I can, however, show you the finished tea cosy! It’s a little snug getting it on and off our teapot, but that does at least mean that it doesn’t flop about when pouring and it does a really good job of keeping the pot warm. I’ve had some tea cosies in the past that you end up pouring the tea *through* which is annoying – they’re not designed to be tea-strainers! The Cartref Yarn is good and sturdy and the double layer of yarn is highly insulating. I may need to reinforce further around the steeked edges (to stop the cut ends wiggling free) as it’s going to be pulled around quite a bit by the spout and handle, but that will be easy enough.

A bright blue Fair Isle tea cosy with dark blue and cream pattern sits on a red teapot on a bamboo kitchen worktop.

There has also been pleasing progress with the border of my new shawl design, using Queensland Yarn’s Llama Lace which is imported by Knitting Fever. Despite the name, this yarn is actually a 4-ply weight as it is 420 yards (384m) per 100g, but it is 100% llama. The shawl doesn’t have a name yet, but it will soon.

The image below shows how well the blocking holds up. The right hand side of the image has been soaked, pinned out and left to dry. This opens up the lace and shows the pattern to its best advantage. The left hand side of the image hasn’t been blocked yet and is more bunched up and almost corrugated. As I mentioned last week, I’m quite impressed by how well the blocked lace (on the right) has coped with being squashed into a small project bag and carted across the country. It’s not perfectly flat still, but it hasn’t been treated with any special care and shows the shawl will work well as a garment in the real world.

A copper coloured garter stitch shawl with a silvery deep edging lies on a pale carpet. Part of the edging has been blocked and lies flat, the rest is bunched up.

If you’re a newsletter subscriber you’ll already know there’s a 20% discount code in this month’s newsletter on the four other knitting designs I have using yarns from the Knitting Fever stable. It can be used multiple times and lasts until the end of June. Of course, you can make the patterns in any brand of yarn you wish, but it might also introduce you to some new yarns. I’ve also added a new subscriber link to my linktr.ee in my social media bios to make it easier for people to sign up.

I’ve also been baking again – banana bread and a sourdough loaf this weekend. There’s nothing quite like sourdough toast. I’m going to need to do some more preserving, having ordered five *bags* of pears instead of the intended five pears last week! There were so many helpful suggestions as to what to make with them on social media last week after I confessed to my lack of attention when ordering the shopping online. I’m planning on pear and ginger jam and bought the sugar this afternoon. The wasps and bees are out in force at present, so I think I’ll be making this early tomorrow morning with the windows shut!

I hope you all have a good week. I’m going to have something very exciting to show you next week and I can’t wait!! Stay safe and keep knitting, Kx

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We Are Family

The past few days have seen my lovely wife and I take a road trip to Kent. Although it had been 8 months since I had seen my mum, it was 9 months for her and 17 since I’d been there! It was glorious weather and we made the most of it, taking a walk to the sea front. Fortunately my sister-in-law (the tall one!) knows the town so well she was able to help us avoid the crowds for most of our walk.

Packing to go away as a knitter has two elements. First of all there are the things that everyone needs to take; clothes, toiletries etc. Then there is the matter of which knitting projects to take. Always in the plural as you want to have choice. I took five. And yes, I did work on all of them!

First of all there was the Nordic Tea Cosy by Zoe Carter (@pinsandneedlesuk). The pattern was part of the Nordic themed Knit-Tea Retreat that I attended via the wonders of the internet in February. I had done quite a bit of this already, so it didn’t take long to finish and steek. Now it just needs to be blocked. The Cartref Yarn is so good – I’d never used it before and I did treat myself to a couple of other colours so there is more to come with this yarn. I love how at this angle the pattern looks a little like a grumpy alien!

A stranded tea-cosy in teal, dark blue and natural cream is held up with my thumb emerging from the stetted hole for the teapot handle. The angle of the Nordic stranded knitting pattern gives the impression of a grumpy face.

Then there was the obligatory sock knitting – excellent for car journeys as, with a ‘vanilla’ sock like this one, after the ribbing you get a big chunk where you are just knitting every round with nothing more taxing to pay attention to than keeping track of how many rounds you’ve done. This was another yarn I bought during the Knit-Tea Retreat – RiverKnits Nene 4-ply in “Starry Night” and the yarn is really living up to its name. I didn’t get a whole lot done of this sock as this is for said lovely wife and she does prefer her socks knit to a tight gauge. These are on 2mm needles. The section you can see here contains more than 4000 stitches!

The beginnings of a multi-coloured plain knit sock with a deep ribbed cuff in blues, silvers and flecks of yellow lies next to the hand wound ball of yarn. They lie on top of a garter stitch shawl and its lace edging. There are 20 rounds of ribbing and 30 rounds of plain knitting, with 80 stitches on the 2mm needles.

I did a couple more ‘hexiflats’ using up old ends of 4-ply. I think the blue is CoopKnits Socks Yeah! and the green is Alice Starmore‘s Hebridean 2-ply.

Two hexiflats lie on a garter stitch shawl. The left one is dark green with pink yarn finishing the last few rounds and it is overlapped by a blue one on the right. Circular sock needles are lying on the blue 'hexiflat'.

The border for my new shawl design in Llama Lace from Knitting Fever is coming on well and the corner has been rounded which is always a good point to get to. The first seven repeats have stayed flat since being blocked (and rolled up and rammed in a project bag), so I have high expectations for how the whole shawl will look once completed.

A copper garter stitch shawl is laid out on a pale carpet. The silver-blue deep lace edging is half completed. Other knitting projects sit on the garter stitch.

The final project I was working on I can’t show you as it is the next MKAL with Yarn O’clock. Believe me, though, it uses some truly great yarn and will be lots of fun to knit.

A tiny bit of pale multi-coloured knitting peeps out of a denim project bag.

My family (both my mum and my family-by-marriage) really support my knitting and I value the fact they don’t mind me knitting away while I’m with them. I’m lucky that they understand knitters can hold conversations and be just as much a part of what’s going on even when we have needles in our hands.

It’s been so good to reconnect with people recently. The English ‘Rule of 6’ for being indoors was a particular bonus as that hasn’t come into force yet in Wales.

Now that we are back home we’ve started tackling the garden in earnest and have begun the annual battle with the ground elder. I’m hoping the weather holds so we can get our garden looking as neat as my in-laws’.

What are you up to this week? Whatever it is, stay safe and keep knitting or doing whatever makes you happy. Kx

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What’s New Pussycat?

Following last week’s excitement of getting the Little Orme Hat pattern and The Little Orme Collection out into the world (and photographed at the Little Orme, too!), there has been a real change of activity in the past couple of days.

I’ve done lots of knitting on my garment commission and I *so* wish I could show it to you, because I am absolutely in love with it. However, you (and I) will have to wait until October before it gets revealed.

As I can’t tell you very much at all about the current main knitting project in my life, I shall have to focus on the other things I’ve been doing. I was very kindly sent a bag of Bowmont Merino fleece locks a little while ago, and over the past few days I’ve been cleaning them. Fortunately, the kind person who sent them to me also sent a couple of links to some very helpful videos (thank you, Anne M and YouTube!), so I had some idea of how to go about this. The change of colour was quite astounding, although the first dip in really hot soapy water and rinse in even more really hot water left quite a lot to be desired. So, they got dunked again, and this time came out gleaming.

Today I attempted to spin some of them – the idea being to spin the yarn as finely as possible. This was much easier said than done, even to get it to catch onto the leader yarn to get going. Eventually it did though and I got about two and a half locks spun, before frustration at the constant falling apart of the yarn finally got to me. So I took a deep breath and put that to one side for the time being.

And then to console myself I got out a plait of Polworth fibre dyed by Rachael of Cat and Sparrow. I got this at The Knit-Tea Retreat marketplace and it was said to be a great fibre type for newer spinners. I love it. As well as the fact that I’m not attempting to spin as finely as possible with this, it’s a gorgeous fibre that so far is behaving beautifully.

Do you remember me talking about the next Craftucation course I’m working on? It’s called An Introduction to Lace Knitting and goes through all the important aspects of lace knitting. You learn many of the common stitches one at a time (yarn overs and eight types of knit decreases!), before putting them together into a practice piece, as well as learning how to follow both a written lace pattern and a lace chart. You then move onto a similar but larger and slightly more challenging small blanket/throw. In this you learn about lifelines – the amazing lengths of thread that stop your knitting unravelling any further – and how to insert and make use of them. You also work a knitted on lace edging and block your finished piece. How cool is all that? All you need to know before undertaking this course is how to cast on, knit, purl and cast off. If you can follow a basic pattern already that is a bonus.

Here is the practice piece:

I’ve recorded a fair chunk of this course already, but I can’t record the next part until my skin heals a bit more. The sudden change back to very cold weather has caused my knuckles to split and that’s not a great look close up on video. I want people to be looking at what my hands are doing rather than the state they’re in!

Hopefully I’ll be able to record the next section soon, but the joy of these courses is that I’m able to create them on my own schedule. Which is the same for the people who take the courses too – no deadlines, no weekly meetings that might not work in your time-zone – you just work through the course at your own pace, in your own way, with access to the tutors and other students on your course via the individual online course forums. There are videos, downloadable and printable pdfs of notes with the video script transcribed and lots of still pictures as well as the original patterns used in the course. So, if you want to try knitting and would like a course that can work for you and around your schedule, have a look at my beginners’ courses: Knitting for Beginners 1 and Knitting for Beginners 2. These links give me a higher proportion of the course fee than if you simply go to the website so if you’d like to starting learning to knit (or know someone else who would), please do use these links!

My current audiobook, Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness (the fourth book in the All Souls Trilogy….), has given me one of those weird coincidences. Last week we watched Hamilton on Disney+ (it’s amazing what you get when you upgrade a phone these days), which I found fascinating and really enjoyable. I previously knew nothing about this period of history. Then, Time’s Convert takes me to the same time period and some of the same characters as well! It’s funny how things sometimes line up together in life like that.

It seems I had plenty to tell you about after all, despite not being able to share the Grand Secret Project!

Stay safe and warm, and keep (or start!) knitting, K x

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Plugging Away

Some days and weeks you get all the fun stuff, some give you the sticky end of the lollipop and some are a real pick and mix. We’re halfway through the Welsh ‘fire-break’ and, as I work from home and haven’t been going out much anyway, I haven’t noticed a big difference in the day-to-day, apart from not being able to visit the lovely Anne at Yarn O’clock.

Very early on Friday morning I had the email no designer wants to see, the “Thank you for your submission; unfortunately…” Quite why I decided to check my email when I woke up at 5.30am I’m not sure, but it’s not a habit I recommend! So, I’ve come to terms with that disappointment over the past few days and I’m now thinking about where else I could submit the design, because, heck – it’s a really good one! Advanced Lace Stole/Wrap anyone?

On the up side of things I’ve been in communication with a really great blogger (hi, Hanna!) and my work preparing my first online course with Craftucation moves on apace. All my videos for it are uploaded, some of the notes are too. It’s aimed at total and complete beginners to knitting. My wife (a non-knitter) has watched it and said that she would be able to follow the course which is really encouraging.

I’m totally in love with my spinning wheel still and I’ve been doing fancy stuff like experimenting with the drive ratios (get me!). This is basically moving the big elastic band that links the wheel to the bobbin so it spins faster or slower – like changing gears on a bike, but imagine manually moving the bike chain every time you want to change gear. Fortunately, it’s not something that needs to change mid-spin. I do seem to be spinning telephone cord (remember the twirly ones?) when it’s on the higher ratios, so I’ll stick to the slow one for now.

If you are a knitter of mitts (or know someone who is) you might be interested in the multi-buy pattern offer I’m running at the moment. If you buy my Ice Diamond Mitts pattern you can get any (or all) of my other three mitts patterns for 20% off. This offer works on my Payhip store and on Ravelry and applies to past purchases of Ice Diamond Mitts too (though on Payhip you’d need to contact me for a special code). I’m not linking to Rav because of the vision problems it is still causing some people since the new look was launched in June and I don’t want to cause anyone a migraine, but if you know you can use it safely the offer’s there too.

I have two sweaters, blocked and ready to photograph which I love and which fit me perfectly. The one in the pic is in Rowan Felted Tweed made completely out of leftovers which has pleased me no end. The pattern is On the Beach by Isabell Kraemer (link goes to Pinterest) and it was used as the ‘base’ pattern for my last live workshop (in February…!) called ‘Making Your Sweater Your Own’. Newly on the needles are some lush DK bed socks (pattern is Bob, friend of Dave by Rachel Coopey) – After doing lots of big projects it’s really nice to settle in with something where you can get half a sock done in two evenings.

Audiobooks are still keeping me company and I have just started re-listening to the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaranovitch and beautifully read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. I’ve also treated myself to the excellent Outlander Knitting book, edited by Kate Atherley. I’ll tell you more about that next week once I’ve had a chance to fully immerse myself in it.

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Design Submissions

One of my favourite types of email landed in my inbox last night – a call for submissions. These have the effect of creating a serious case of ‘start-itis’, unless I’m up to my eyeballs in an existing project/design. Fortunately, I’ve reached the border on the shawl I’m currently designing for Yarn O’clock and I’m therefore allowing myself to be tempted.

Submission calls vary greatly. Some just have a word or idea, like ‘growth’, and these are the most open, but can also be the hardest to work with. Some come with big mood boards, showing inspirational pictures that are often nothing to do with knitting, but capture the theme or idea of the call. Some show knitted items in the style that would be welcomed, a kind of “this sort of thing, but not exactly this”. They all nearly always tell you what type of items are being looked for, what size range is needed, what type of knitted fabrics are wanted (lace, cables etc) and usually, but not always, what the ‘compensation’ is – how much they’ll pay.

The one I got yesterday is for ‘advanced lace’ shawls and wraps. This is right up my street and I love an excuse to get all complex! So, today I have begun my process towards submission. There’s always a lot to do, but I don’t mind that as if it doesn’t get selected then I’ll have a design ready and raring to go for someone else or for self-publication.

For the first time (influenced by my bullet journalling course) I have put a list down of all the steps I need to complete for the submission. I’ve done the first two, which might not seem much, but it’s an important start. For example, I try not to use silk anymore, so I’ve gone through the list of yarns available for this submission and selected ones that don’t contain silk. I’ve also rejected superwash yarns as I find they don’t keep their shape quite as well after blocking when working fine, open lace patterns. That left me with a choice of two! Using that I’ve gone through my stash (mostly looking at leftovers from previous designs/projects) and chosen some yarns that are a good match in terms of how they’re spun and what they’re made of (shown in pic at top). Now the fun can really begin. I think I will appreciate my list more and more in the next couple of weeks as there’s often something I will forget to do (like measuring the gauge – how many stitches and rows there are per 10cm).

My design submission job-list

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Keep knitting, K x