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 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).
How can a week have gone so quickly? It was wonderful to see my mum again last week (and to achieve the journey). I am very glad to report that she approves of both the marmalade (possibly my best yet!) and the sourdough bread, though the crusts were a little too crusty once toasted. I, of course, came back with some freshly cut asparagus, plants and some other lovely things too.
The yarn Mum chose to keep was the first skein I ever spun on my wheel. I was a bit surprised as it’s not the most evenly spun yarn by any means, but it is soft and colourful.
While I was with her I swatched with the yarn so I could write a pattern for her to use it with. I cheated a bit as I didn’t block it, but it’s garter stitch, not anything fancy. I mainly needed to find out what size needles would work best to create a fabric soft enough to go around Mum’s neck, what size the stitches were and therefore how many stitches she would need to cast on. It was one of those moments when mathematics just works. 20 sts measured 13cm. This meant that 1cm is 1.538etc sts. The circumference required is 65cm. 65 x 1.538etc = 100 sts exactly! Tidy, beautiful and satisfying.
I also realised whilst swatching with the yarn that it was the first time *I* had knit with my own handspun yarn. I’ve had a wheel since late September/early October and I’ve spun quite a lot, but not knitted any of it! One skein has been balled up ready to go, but for some reason I haven’t got it on the needles yet. That needs to change.
Both my time with Mum and the travelling there and back encompassed almost all varieties of weather – sunshine, cloud, rain, hail, thunderstorms. Pretty much everything except snow. It’s amazing to think that in less than four weeks it will be midsummer’s day and I still haven’t put my winter wool dresses away. The rain over the weekend did inspire us to have a rearrange of some of the furniture in our little home, tidying up generally and making things easier to find.
The past couple of days have seen me updating and streamlining my website. So far I’ve done the Wooden Treats and Kits pages. The main pages now look a lot sleeker and should be easier to navigate. Along with the rather lovely redesign of Payhip storefronts, I like how my work is being presented. The Knitting Patterns page comes next and I know that will be a mammoth task as there are something like 43 individual patterns and three collections.
My new rubber stamps arrived yesterday. One of them I will definitely be able to use for wood burning designs – I stamp the design on the wood and then burn over it – and it’s the perfect size for coasters and hanging hearts along with a little message. What do you think? What messages would ‘ewe’ like to see?
That’s all for today – I’m off to knit some more edging on my new shawl design. Take care, stay safe and keep knitting! Kx
Today I will make the longest journey I have undertaken in over 8 months. I’m driving 120 miles to visit my mum. I’ll be so glad to see her after all this time, but I don’t mind telling you that the prospect of that drive and being away from home is making me anxious. It will be worth it though.
So many new things have happened since I last saw her. Sourdough for one. I baked a loaf this morning to take down with me.
Spinning is another. Although my lovely Ashford Joy 2 is very transportable in its carry bag, I’ll probably just take some skeins of handspun yarn to show Mum (and to keep if she feels her hands are up to knitting it). I’m only there for two days so there probably wouldn’t be time to spin anyway. Maybe next time.
Remember the marmalade I made in January – unsupervised for the first time? Two jars of that will be coming with me too. The marmalade used to travel in the opposite direction, but that’s just another sign of the way the years change relationships.
My new shawl design is coming on well. I’m using Queensland Collection Llama Lace from Knitting Fever Inc which is 100% extrafine baby llama. The main body is very, very simple; just garter stitch, with a double slip stitch edging on the top. There will be a knitted on deep lace border in a contrasting colour once the main shawl is complete. Llama is a new fibre to me – there are the (very) occasional spikier fibres in it which can be pulled out easily, but overall it is incredibly soft. Knitted on 4mm needles the garter stitch is light and airy and the ‘halo’ on the yarn (the fuzzy bits) will trap the air between the stitches to add an extra layer of warmth.
Finally, there is one more very new thing in my life. A couple of weeks ago I began ‘A Masterclass on Grading’ by The Tech Editor Hub. It’s a very well-structured course, with lots of support and feedback from the three tutors and it has a flexible scholarship scheme too which can reduce the fees by 50%, 75% or 100%. I’m learning all sorts of new tricks to use with Excel. Previously, if I used Excel at all I would treat it like a table in Word; do my calculations on a calculator and type them in! Now I’m learning more about formulae. The historical aspect of how sizing charts developed is fascinating too – initially, it was done so that military uniforms could be mass-produced in the American Civil War. Grading (working out all the different sizes for a pattern) was the one thing not included in my City & Guilds course, so I feel like this will give me more confidence and skill, especially when designing garments. I’m sure I’ll be telling Mum loads about this too – she specialised in tailoring at teacher training college when she trained to be a Domestic Science (home economics) teacher, so I’m sure she’ll have loads to contribute.
I hope you are able to catch up with someone special soon. Stay safe and keep knitting. K x
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
Can you believe it’s six months since I launched this blog? So the website is six months and one week old! Reading back over my first post I was concerned then about the changes Ravelry had made (though I left it un-named), was excited about Craftucation (from which I received my first payment yesterday!) and showed a picture of the view from the Little Orme, one of my favourite places, and the place after which the collection I am currently working on is named. The hat pattern will be released soon by the way! Today’s picture is unashamedly the same one as from that first post.
I didn’t know then that I would be getting a spinning wheel, or bringing a sourdough starter into existence and doing lots more baking. I also didn’t know that I wouldn’t see my mum once in this whole six months. Sometimes it’s good not to be able to see into the future. Hopefully the restrictions on travel between Wales and England will be lifted soon and I’ll be able to visit her again.
Today, there are butterflies in the garden, it’s 20 degrees outside and the sun is shining. The blackcurrant bush is coming into leaf and the redcurrant is just starting to think about joining it. Last year I allowed all the redcurrants to be eaten by the birds, partly because I hadn’t pruned it and the stems were so overlapping that it I couldn’t face the tangle. Now, of course, that means we have run out of redcurrant jelly, which is a real shame and meant that on Sunday I did something I’ve never done before; I *bought* a jar of redcurrant jelly! Inspired by the weather today and Sunday’s purchase, this morning I pruned the redcurrant bush and promised to take better care of it in future.
Sunday itself was an adventure; we went to a garden centre. They were allowed to re-open in Wales just over a week ago I think. Our nearest one is exactly five miles away, though it felt further! We bought some red cowslips which I have never seen before, some cell trays for the veg seeds and a few other bits and pieces, including the redcurrant jelly. It was so strange to be out in a place where there were quite a few other people and, although our trip was quite a brief one (less than 30 mins), by the time we were through the tills I was glad to be going home again.
It feels late to be planting seeds in a way, but with the extreme winds of yesterday and the snow and sleet forecast for Easter weekend here I didn’t want to kill off delicate seedlings, so I still haven’t done it. Next week!
Following my post about Ravelry last week I had a lovely message from someone offering me an extension/theme that might help. If you’ve seen my social media posts you’ll know what happened; I stupidly compared the version of Rav showing with the theme to the actual NuRav page and got hit with a horrible headache and nausea. It slowed me down somewhat on Friday to say the least. But, at least I know the theme works! I won’t be going onto Ravelry more than I have to after tomorrow though.
Speaking of which, there is a plan to stage a three day boycott of Ravelry from 31st March to 2nd April. Why bother? Well, their main income is from the advertising that users are shown and if you’re not on there, you won’t be shown adverts and so their revenue will drop. It may not have any impact at all or change anything, but I’m happy to wait to pay my March invoice for a couple of days!
Some exciting developments happened during the week with my magazine commission. Having received the email listing the chosen yarn and colours, I expressed some concerns about the way that yarn would behave given the nature of the design. Those concerns were listened to, considered and a different (much more appropriate) yarn was proposed. There is a whole new colour scheme and a new name. Also, a new gauge as the yarn is a slightly different weight, but that just means I get to play with numbers a bit more. It’s making me want to stalk the postman for yarn deliveries, but fortunately I have plenty of other things to keep me busy in the meantime.
I hope the year is being kind to you so far and that you are benefitting from the longer daylight hours. I know I am.
Stay safe and keep knitting, gardening, baking, spinning and doing what makes you happy. K x
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.
Nature is weird, wonderful and amazing. Only a few days ago it was so cold that the water butt was frozen solid and yet today we have been out for a walk without our coats on (!) and these bright pink flowers decided to open again. They seem to close at the end of each day and after the really cold snap we had I thought they were done for because they hadn’t opened in almost a week, but here they are. I don’t know what they are, but they are the brightest thing in the border and they make me smile. There is an app to identify plants on your phone by scanning them, but I’ve done the more traditional thing to learn this plant’s name; I took a photo and have sent it to my mum. She’ll know. (She did, sort of – it’s a ‘species crocus’, but she can’t remember the exact name!).
Yesterday afternoon the thing I have been raving about for months finally happened! Craftucation.com went live!! It was a soft launch with 13 courses available in a wide variety of crafts at the moment, but there will be many, many more coming. Two of the courses are mine (as I might have mentioned once or twice) and there are courses on crafts I’ve never even heard of before – and I have a fairly broad crafting experience. Ice-dyeing, anyone? This looks really cool! Or Anglo-Saxon embroidery? Beautiful! There are also ones you are likely to be more aware of – felting, crochet, sewing, cake sculpting/decorating, and more knitting. The folks behind this venture have worked so hard and have made the website easy to navigate and friendly as well, with a range of chat forums (fora?), including ones for the students of each course to share their progress, ask questions and communicate with the tutor. So, you’re not just on your own once you’ve bought your course, which is so important when you’re learning something new.
My Heart in my Hands Collection was published in full on Sunday too (it’s been a busy few days). It seemed appropriate to get it out there on February 14th! Photographing all three sizes of hat made me realise that there has been quite a lot of knitting happening here since the New Year. There have been these three hats, the matching cowl, my Little Orme mitts in (almost) original colours – I’m halfway through the second mitt, my Llanberis hats (at least two were knitted this year) and my Serenity jumper using my Bear in Sheep’s Clothing advent mini-skeins which is coming on nicely. I’m currently on the yarn from Day 14. That’s in six weeks! Oh, and I’ve been swatching like mad for my third Craftucation course – An Introduction to Lace Knitting. During the week I’m going to gather everything together and photograph it all to share with you visually next week.
I also submitted a design to a UK mag. It’s a lovely design idea that I really want to get out there. I don’t hear back for a little while yet, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
In sourdough starter news, I have had a breakthrough today. It’s been bubbling and looking interesting, but not actually growing in size. Some friends on Facebook shared their starter tips with me, many of which included ‘throw some rye flour at it’. I don’t have any of that, but I do have wholemeal, so this morning I fed the starter with a half and half mix of strong white flour and strong wholemeal. And it’s loving it! It’s almost doubled in size for the first time and I’m getting quite excited, especially as, having named my starter (Audrey) I was beginning to worry that I was going to need to try again. But, hey, the name is ready if that does happen – Audrey 2 (from Little Shop of Horrors in case that made no sense to you at all).
I’m still enjoying my spinning very much and am trying to ensure that I spin at least twice a week. I’ve finished the first half of the wonderful fibre dyed by Anne Murray that I showed you a couple of weeks ago and started the second half last night. Mostly I’m getting an even twist and a regular thickness, but sometimes I lose my way a little and it just stops holding together. I think because I am focussing hard on not over-spinning it and making it too tight there is a tendency to go too far the other way and not put enough twist in. Perhaps it’s a hint that I need to spend a bit more time with the online course that I’m using (Spinning with a Purpose, by Katie Weston from Hilltop Cloud)?
Anyway, that’s enough from me for today – I have spinning to do!
Take care, stay safe and go explore something new, K x
Yesterday was apparently Blue Monday. It’s not something I subscribe to, although two people I spoke to said they’d felt a bit more down than usual. I’m not sure that simply being the third Monday of the year is enough to qualify in this particular decade – there are plenty of other things going on.
It’s raining here in North Wales today. No surprise there, but it’s due to keep on raining for the next couple of days, after which we get a couple of days of sleet! Thank you, Storm Christopher. I am so glad we live up a very big hill – I would rather get snowed in than flooded any day. Despite the rain, or maybe even because of it, it is the perfect time to be knitting hats and cowls.
About a year ago, when I was doing stalls at the local pop-up shop, one of the people browsing said that I should do hats and cowls to match my stranded mitt designs and that is what I am currently working on. It was so lovely to return to charts I knew and ‘play’ with them, trying out different variations and seeing what I liked most. It’s ‘only’ taken me a year to respond to that feedback, but I get there in the end.
The cowl to go with Heart in my Hands Mitts is done. I just need to make sure I’m 100% happy with a couple of design decisions and then it will be published. The hat is not far behind. The cowl will be in one size (or maybe two), the hat in three, and there will be more maths involved in getting the sizing just right for the hat, hence why I did the cowl first! What do you think?
Heart in my Hands Mitts and Cowl
If you have subscribed to my newsletter via the sign-up on the website, you will know that there is a special 15% subscriber-only discount running until the end of January on ALL my products in the payhip shop (everything on the website links to this). This covers not only digital downloads of patterns, but also all the wooden treats and knitting kits too! What a bargain! I know I mentioned last week there would be a discount code in the newsletter, but if you sign up before the end of the month, that discount could be yours as well.
Llanberis Mystery Knit-along is going well. It feels weird that it will be over so soon though – the third and final part is being released on Friday. People are posting their progress on Facebook and Instagram, and saying that they are enjoying the pattern. That’s one of the things I like best about social media – you can see what people make with your designs and get instant feedback.
Even a bit of negative feedback can be useful – certainly more so than radio silence. I had an email a couple of weeks ago from someone who didn’t like the layout of one of my patterns. Initially, I was offended and a bit hurt, but after I’d got over myself (and had a sleep) I looked at it again and thought about what I could do to improve things. This is the Beanstalk Throw I wrote about last week and shows how even negative feedback can help you develop – as long as there isn’t too much of it!
I made the marmalade last Wednesday. It’s gorgeous, though it did take six hours – partly because I had forgotten that though my mum’s fast hob ring is front left, mine is back right, so if I want a fast boil I need to remember whose kitchen I am in! Fortunately I managed to move the preserving pan without burning myself. It’s a therapeutic process in some ways, whilst leaving you totally wiped out in others, albeit with the added bonus of about a year’s worth of marmalade.
13 lbs of Marmalade cooling in their jars
Yesterday I had some fun with my spinning wheel. I haven’t done any of the exercises in Katie Weston’s Spinning with a Purpose course for a while, so I had a go at making slubs and also some consistently thicker yarn than my ‘standard’ instinctive spinning tends to produce. I don’t know whether it’s a tension thing or if I just want to scrape every last bit of value out of the fibre I have, but I have tended towards the finer fingering-weight and lace-weight end of things. This was a challenge. I loved it. I’m also ridiculously pleased with the slubby yarn I made, despite the fact there’s only about two metres of it and I’m unlikely to ever be able to knit with it. I just want to admire it and pet it! WPI stands for ‘wraps per inch’, as in how many times yarn of that thickness can be wrapped around a piece of card or wood an inch wide. The gap at the top of the WPI tool in the photos is an inch wide (and the massive slub almost fills it!). The numbers under the horizontal lines show how wide a strand of yarn would be if it were 4/6/8 etc wraps per inch.
Slubby Yarn hung round spinning wheelMassive slub on WPI tool
Skein of Bulky yarn on WPI toolSingle strand of Bulky yarn on WPI tool
Skein of DK/Worsted weight yarn on WPI toolTwo strands of DK/Worsted weight yarn on WPI tool
Speaking of challenges and learning new stuff – Craftucation will be going live in less than four weeks!!!! (Yes, I know four exclamation marks are a lot, but I think this warrants it). I will be jumping around and shouting about this more and more as February 15th comes around. If there is a new craft you are interested in learning, that will be the place to go. Not all the course will be up at the very start, but it will grow and there will be some wonderful opportunities to learn new skills.
Keep going – you can do it. And keep knitting. And stay warm. K x
You may or may not have noticed that I’m tending towards using song titles for my blog posts. Music has been a huge part of my life ever since my mum used to hum into the top of my head to help me sleep as a baby. (And, of course, there were the 21 years when I was a music teacher for 11-18 year olds!)
I’m feeling quite sentimental today as it’s our 15th anniversary. We started off with a Civil Partnership and converted it on our 9th anniversary so that we became legally married. It’s the most amazing thing to know that someone has got your back through thick and thin and that you’ve got theirs too. And Dolly Parton’s song is also rather splendid!
Looking back over the past week I can safely say it has been eventful. So many people’s plans for the next few days have been upended and here in Wales ‘non-essential’ businesses have once again had to close their doors. There is definitely an air of increased caution in our town and most people are being even more aware of giving each other space.
It’s great that Yarn O’clock has several people already signed up for our next MKAL. As a reminder, Llanberis is a colour-work accessory, using no more than 25g of each of 3 colours of DK yarn, released in three parts and starting on January 8th 2021. You can buy the pattern on its own from me, while Anne is selling kits in the shop (and will post/do click and collect). If you buy the pattern on Payhip, just make sure you tick the box underneath where you type your email address (to allow product updates), so I can easily send you each section of the pattern as it is released.
There are new two new calls for submissions for me to experiment with which is perfect timing now that I have got my second Craftucation course up and listed, (of course, my brain has started planning the next course already…) and I’ve been doing more spinning! Lots of yarnie things to play with.
Anne was delighted with her yarn, created from some of the fluff she gave me.
Teal and black yarn handspun to about a sport-weight, lying on the sideboard
Today’s post will be the final one of 2020. I will write again on January 5th. It sounds like a long way off and who knows what the world will have brought us by then, but, in reality, it is only two weeks.
Until then, stay as safe as you can, enjoy Christmas and New Year however you keep them, and keep knitting! K x
So, the world is starting to look a little more hopeful; there are signs of a vaccine that might work and a world leader who can speak calmly and in grammatically complete sentences. Closer to home I’ve been starting to think about the next MKAL (Mystery Knit-along) with Yarn O’clock – we had a quick chat about it last week and I’m going to enjoy designing this one a lot.
This week’s pic is a line up of my wheel spinning efforts so far, in order from left to right. The one on the right is my first attempt at woollen spinning as opposed to worsted spinning. I definitely found it easier to control, though it did require more prep beforehand. Unsurprisingly I have little say over the finished thickness of the yarn I’m spinning at the moment and so I have signed up to “Spinning With A Purpose” which is an online course by Katie of Hilltop Cloud which has the aim of helping you intentionally spin a wide range of thicknesses of yarn with consistency. It’s making sense so far (I’ve been learning about how to accurately measure wraps per inch today) and I think it’s important to be in the learner’s seat regularly – especially since I’m going to be offering online courses of my own soon.
I’m still uploading some bits to my first beginners’ knitting course for Craftucation and having great support from the website developer when things don’t behave as I anticipate, but I’ve already started mapping out the next and I expect I’ll be recording some of it soon!
Last week I told you about Outlander Knitting, edited by Kate Atherley. Well, I’ve had a chance to read it all and it’s a truly great book. There is background on the costume designer for the series and on the historical elements of the garments. I particularly appreciated how the designs in the book were inspired by a specific scene from Outlander and not only did we get a still from the show, it was labelled with the Series and Episode number as well! There were also sections explaining how, for example, a shield came to be interpreted as a Fair Isle hat design. There’s a wide range of knitting techniques, styles and skill levels in play throughout the book and it was lovely to see bios of each designer with links to where we could find more of their work.
I haven’t had as much experience of Zoom as many people have had during lockdown, but on Saturday I spent the day (10.30 – 5!!) in front of my laptop for the Knitting History Forum‘s AGM and Conference. This is normally something I’ve seen happening in a far-off place (like that London, or even further) and thought that I can’t really justify the enormous train fare or, when I was teaching, the time commitment of a whole Saturday that would inevitably involve leaving the house before 6am.
However, there have been some definite bonuses to the limitations on travel and this was one of them. I was able to attend virtually and learnt LOADS about a wide range of historical knitting from info about the Textile Research Centre in the Netherlands to detailed studies of 18th Century Abbesses gloves and knitting for money in Glasgow in the 1980s which only covers a fraction of the presentations. I love detail and information like the gauge at which the gloves were knitted (100 sts and 150 rows to 10cm!!) so it was right up my street, even though I am not used to sitting still for so long anymore. There were also presentations on some studies that current PhD students are conducting into “knitting as a thinking tool” (Michelle Hanks) and “knitting as a form of journalling” (Emily Rickard). Before the day was up I’d joined the KHF.
Writing all this makes me realise that I have actually done quite a lot this week, which is good as I sometimes feel I haven’t been ‘busy enough’. Perhaps I’m still adjusting from spending 21 years in the classroom – I’ve only been out of it for two years after all. My bullet journal is also good for this as a record is kept of what I’ve done in the day and it’s now that place that ALL my notes, ideas and plans go which means stuff doesn’t get lost because it was on a random piece of paper that got ‘tidied up’ (thrown out). One day soon I’m going to try the idea of a ‘done’ list rather than a ‘to do’ list – it’s said to be very empowering and we could all do with more of that!
