Tag: Pop Up Wool Show

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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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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