On Friday I went to a workshop (with my mum) on Horst Schultz’s Patchwork Knitting techniques with Rosie Sykes in Marlow. It was wonderful fun, and we covered lots of different ways of knitting small modules and then knitting more modules onto them.

Rosie was a great teacher, very patient and organised, and we covered all sorts of things, including handy edgings which are easy to pick up stitches from, which I must remember to use in other projects not just patchwork knitting.

Here is an example of the first sort of patchwork squares we were knitting. I have had a go at this sort of thing before, but it was really good to have a reminder, I feel inspired to try out some more experiments with this kind of thing

I really like the effect that baxcraft has achieved with these kind of squares, by knitting with black as the foreground garter stitch stripe, and a multicoloured yarn as the background stocking stitch stripe. I definitely see more playing around with these techniques in my future! Although hopefully with some slightly nicer coloured yarn (you will be pleased to know that the worst horrors of my yarn colour choices aren’t being featured on the blog!)

Later on, one of the shapes we had a go at were leaves.

One of the ladies who had been to Horst’s workshop last year had brought along a lovely jacket she had knitted using these shapes, very inspiring. I would definitely like to have a go at a scarf using this shape, done in autumn colours. I have a lovely collection of cones of Shetland 4ply which would be just right for this. I am currently knitting a variation on Alice Starmore’s Henry VIII in these yarns though so I want to finish that first. After all I would be incredibly annoyed if I made a scarf with some of the yarn and then discovered I didn’t have enough left to finish the jumper!

Last of all we had a go at some shells shapes, similar to those done by Maureen Mason-Jamieson. She has a free pattern for a bag using these shapes on her site, but I don’t seem to be able to link to it directly. You can find it by clicking on freebies at the bottom of the main page and then clicking on Shell Purse Pattern. Rosie had brought a sample she had knitted in this pattern which was really effective, a lovely choice of colours, and the shapes tile together in a very pleasing manner.

All in all the day was wonderful, if you have a chance to go on a similar workshop definitely jump at it. Marlow was lovely too, we had a little walk around at lunchtime and saw some of the sights. Jill organised the day to perfection, with breaks for tea and coffee just when we needed them (have to fuel the brain cells after all!). I am hoping there will be another one next year, and in the mean time I shall be thinking about what to knit with the techniques I have just learned.

Mummy and Daddy left this morning, so the washing machine is on full blast recycling the sheets for when they are back again in two weeks on their way on holiday! I think I shall be good and knit a bit more of the to-be-felted bag while I wait for the washing to do, and for the weather to cool down a little. We went to Wisley yesterday and bought a couple of nice plants, I think hopefully in an hour or two it might be cool enough to venture into the garden to plant them.

I’m back now from a lovely holiday. Shropshire was really interesting and we visited lots of castles and priories and whatnot. The we went on up to North Yorkshire to stay with my parents for my Mum’s birthday. She had a lovely day and we had lots of nice outings.

I didn’t get much knitting done while we were away, a bit of the latest sock but that was about it. I have done a bit more of the multi coloured cotton jumper since we have been back, and here is it so far:

Just the edgings to go now, the end is in sight! I have borrowed the DVD of Pride and Prejudice from my sister so I think that might be the evenings viewing while I finish this off. I have had a preliminary try on and it seems pretty good, although perhaps a little wide around the top of the sleeves. I think I will have to do the edgings and give it a nice little wash and push into shape before I pass judgement though.

Now to move not-so-smoothly into the subject of this post. Yesterday I had a trip to Staples in Horsham and got 4 64 litre plastic storage boxes. I have filled them all up already 🙂 They are just the right size to fit under our spare bed, so two have gone under there already filled with some of Paul’s clothes and my dancing stuff. I have decided to use the other two to organise my yarn a bit. So one is full of sock yarn and the other has some of my odds and ends in. It is rather depressing to find that I have more than 64 litres of odds and ends!

If you have ever wondered what 64 litres of sock yarn looks like, here it is:

I think that should keep me going for a while 🙂

Off to catch up on all the blogs I have missed.

I’ve finally decided that it will be a couple of pairs of socks which will accompany me on holiday. They are nice and small and portable and just mindless enough 🙂

Unfortunately not much actual knitting has got done over the last couple of days, but the washing machine has been on overdrive! I think we are now all washed and partly packed, I must go and consult my list and see what I have forgotten.

Hope the weather holds for our week and a bit away!

I forgot to mention in my last post, but after all the umming and ahhing I decided to buy the Hanne Falkenberg Mermaid kit in Colourway 4. I was rather worried about whether the colours would be ok but luckily they are wonderful, even nicer than they looked on the website. It is always a bit of a difficulty to gauge colour accurately from a website particularly with different monitor settings and whatnot. I know that my monitor usually shows things slightly darker than they really are, which means telling the difference between black, dark brown and dark blue on a website can often be a challenge! Anyway, here is a picture of the kit in its lovely smart bag!

I am going to be good and not start it until I have finished off some of the things I have on the needles at the moment. I find I am generally better to work on only a few things at once, enough for variety but not so many that I forget what I was thinking about for each one.

The multi-coloured cotton jumper is progressing but rather slowly now. I have joined the second sleeve in now and although the end is sort of in sight the rows now are obscenely long, I think it took me over an hour to knit the most recent row. At least each row is getting shorter and shorter, and I am just carrying on knitting til I think the neck is the right depth and then I shall have a think about the shoulders. Unfortunately it is not particularly photogenic right now in its scrunched-up-on-the-needles state so there isn’t a picture for your delectation.

We are off on holiday on Friday for a week away which I’m really looking forward to. We are going to have a bit of an English Heritage fest for the weekend on our way up the country to visit my parents for the rest of the week. It is Mummy’s birthday on Thursday 11th, I wont tell you what I have got her in case she gets round to reading this 🙂 Although actually quite a lot of her pressies are things she has requested.

As is often the case with holidays though I am having the customary what-knitting-to-take dilemma. The difficulty is that the multi-coloured jumper requires lots of balls of yarn taken with it since I haven’t decided beyond the next stripe or two what colour or pattern I am using, also it is getting a bit big for dragging around. The to-be-felted bag is being made from oiled shetland and so requires a lot of hand washing, again more of a sit around knit rather than an on-the-go knit. I have a sock on the needles (what a surprise!) but I’m not sure how much time I will have for knitting, so will just one pair of socks be enough? Oh the choices, the choices!

I shall think on it all while doing another row on the multi-coloured jumper and contemplating what to feed my sister when she comes round for lunch tomorrow.

Hope the weather is good next week.

Well, I haven’t disappeared off the face of the planet but it has been a busy couple of weeks.

Since my last post, I have been to The Beadwork Fair at Lingfield Park, which was great fun. Oddly enough despite being a bead fair I managed to buy some knitting needles 🙂 I bought another set of 2.5mm rosewood dpns to replace the ones I have had a few years and which are all rather bent and one has snapped. I did buy a few beads too, I found a lovely selection of pretty coloured delica beads, which I am going to make into bracelets when I finally get round to it. I am not very fast at this beading lark, as can be witnessed by the fact that I am still only 2 inches into the bracelet I started just after the 2003 Beadwork Fair.

I also went to the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the V&A which was fantastic. A really interesting collection of exhibits, in a well thought out exhibition. I would encourage you all to go but unfortunately I see from their website that the Exhibition closed yesterday 🙁 The V&A generally is always worth an outing though, and I am definitely resolved to try and get there more often and have a closer look at all the amazing things they have.

Keeping on the theme of the V&A I also went back there for the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM, when we had a talk on knitting at the V&A and conservation, all interesting stuff. The previous day a few of us also had a very interesting and illuminating tour of the textile conservation department also organised by the Knitting and Crochet Guild. A lovely chance to meet up with lots of knitters too, and wonderful to see all the things they were making or had brought along to show. I am definitely inspired by Mary Graham’s knitting with wire to have another go myself. The shapes she had knitted were quite different from what you can achieve in a more floppy material like most yarns, they rather reminded me of surfaces of constant negative curvature which you get in non-Euclidean geometry (worth clicking the link for the pretty pictures even if you aren’t a mathematician!).

As well as the outings my parents have been to stay twice in the last week! Both on their way to, and on their way back from a holiday in France, and it has been both my parents-in-law’s birthdays. Just to add to the general hecticness, the TV broke on Saturday and the car needs a service, it doesn’t rain but it pours!

In among all this domestic chaos I have managed to knit a bit more on the multicoloured cotton jumper, and here is the first sleeve, nearly finished.

Since photographing this I have now joined it to the body, unfortunately no photo since the camera batteries died and are currently recharging. Hopefully I’ll take a piccie tomorrow.

So, I am off to catch up on all the blog reading I have missed, cast on for the second sleeve and possibly read a bit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (I am hopelessly slow and only on chapter 4 so far).

The new KnitCast is here! This one is an interview with Kate Gilbert, the designer of the Clapotis (I think I must be the only knitter ever who hasn’t knitted one and has no particular plans to! I think it is a lovely pattern but can’t really see myself wearing it).

I’ve given up on the weather cheering up enough to take a progress photo of the multi-coloured cotton jumper outside so here is one of it taken on the settee:

Its coming along. I think I am only a couple of stripes away from the start of the neckline – it is going to be a V-neck. Once I reach the underarm I shall put the body on stitch holders and work both sleeves, and then work out how I am going to do the shoulders.

Apart from the knitting I have been very domesticated recently (quite shocking I assure you). Today I defrosted both freezers and yesterday we actually got round to fitting a new light fitting in the bathroom (the old one broke weeks, maybe even months ago), and I only electrocuted myself once! We decided that was enough DIY for the time being so we haven’t put up the shelves in our bedroom yet. I am hoping to get round to that before my parents come to stay in a couple of weeks, since at the moment you can’t actually even sit on the spare bed let alone sleep on it.

Anyway, back to the cotton jumper, I think I am going to do a purple stripe next …

And happy Independence Day to any Americans out there.

I actually finished this bag a few days ago, but it languished waiting for some suitably old towels to accompany it in the washing machine, and then it languished again waiting for me to find it a nice button. After all the procrastination here it is finally:

Knitted felted bag

It is knitted on 8mm needles if I remember correctly, using 4 strands of 2ply lambswool from Uppingham Yarns. Then it went through the washing machine and the dryer twice with a nice selection of similar coloured towels which are old enough not to impart fluff on anything they are washed with. I am part way through the next bag which will be shaded black and purple, I haven’t got very far with it yet though as I have been waylaid by the multicoloured cotton jumper which always seems much more exciting when I sit down for a spot of knitting.

The weather has been a bit off and on the last couple of days so the tennis has been a bit stilted. I still caught a bit of both the women’s semi-finals yesterday which were good for watching while I knitted a couple of rounds on the cotton jumper. Cotton jumper is progressing, though rather slowly, I’m onto a stripe in a kind of tomato red, which actually looks a bit subtle compared to my other colour choices. Not to worry, I have a nice bright green to knit the next large stripe in. I’ll hopefully post another pic of the progress tomorrow if the weather is good enough for an outside picture.

Thanks for the comment Tari! I love bright colours, always have done, and am always on the look out for lovely coloured yarn. I think it is the first thing that draws me to a yarn, whether the colour jumps out at me, and then I have to stroke it to see if it feels nice!

I have been a good girl and have been weaving in the ends as I go along, the horror of having thousands of ends to weave in after the knitting has been motivating me in this task. I’ve been trying out the method recommended in this Knitty article, and it looks pretty good so far if I do say so myself. It is a bit noticeable on the wrong side because when I cut the ends I left a bit of a tail since cotton tends to work its way through to the right side otherwise, but the right side looks very smooth. The only thing is that I haven’t really conquered how to weave in ends in moss stitch (I think this is seed stitch in American).

In other news I ordered a new wedding ring today which is quite exciting. My fingers tend to swell up a lot in the hot and humid weather and I realised last week that the wedding ring I bought last year is really just too small. I think it depends on the shape of the ring because my engagement ring is exactly the same size and although tight in the hot weather I can still get it on and off, however the wedding ring had got to the point that I couldn’t get it on and off at all if the temperature went above about 25 degrees (C that is, I have no idea what that is in F). So I have ordered a new ring and it should arrive in about three weeks, it is going to be hopefully practically identical to the first one, just three sizes bigger, so I shall have a summer ring and a winter ring 🙂

The multicoloured cotton jumper is progressing, though rather slowly now. I have just joined into the round and am knitting away on the jade green stripe (it is more green in real life than on this picture).

A little bit bigger

Its good fun, choosing what colour to put next and what stitch pattern livens up the knitting. It is growing quite slowly now though as the rows are pretty long. I’ve got quite a while of just knitting along before I need to worry about the underarm or the neck. I’m not quite sure yet due to the angle of the diagonal whether I will have to split for the neck or the underarm first, when it is a bit bigger I shall try it up against myself and see what I reckon.

I’m using my coil-less pins that I bought from Schoolhouse Press a couple of weeks ago as stitch markers and they are proving very useful and convenient, I would really recommend them. It is handy to be able to mark a particular stitch rather than the gap between stitches for the design I am working on, and they don’t ping off the needles like other stitch markers do. It is one of the reasons I haven’t bought any of the beautiful beaded stitch markers yet, because I am worried I will ping them off and lose them or bend and snap them like I have with the plastic ones.

The latest issues of Interweave Knits and Knitters arrived last week so I am reading through them at the moment. Lots of interesting articles, but nothing I have found yet that I would really like to knit. I’ve got plenty of things in the would-like-to-be-started pile though so it is possibly a good thing that I haven’t found anything else to add to it!

Women’s semi-finals at Wimbledon today so a bit of knitting and watching time this afternoon I think. I shall just have to hope that the matches aren’t too stressful and so don’t ruin my tension!

These are the cones I ordered from Coldspring Mills that arrived last weekend. Aren’t they pretty colours?

Cones from Coldspring

From left to right they are: Baby Cashmerino, Cotton Cashmere, and two cones of Cathay. There should be enough on each cone to knit a garment for me, although I’m not quite sure what yet. They are lovely and soft, and at the moment the box is sitting on one of our dining chairs so I can stroke them as I pass.

The weather has cooled off a bit today so it is a bit more like knitting weather. It has been really quite hot and humid the last week. We went into London for a birthday party on Thursday night and I tried to knit the latest sock on the train but hardly got any done because I was so sticky.

The multicoloured cotton jumper is progressing, I’ll try and photograph it tomorrow. I have just joined the front to the back and am now trundling along in a nice bright teal colour. Kate recommended a Knitty article on weaving in ends which I have just had a go at, and it is really good, much less noticeable than my previous efforts. I am having a go at weaving in some of the ends as I go along with the cotton jumper so the horror isn’t too great when I actually finish the knitting.

Our internet connection seems to be back up and running again, thank goodness! It has been driving me mad. NTL are going to replace our cable box in a couple of weeks as the one we have is rather ancient, hopefully this will solve some of the connection problems, and the freezing up that the telly does sometimes. It has taken me two tries to get this posted, the connection just seems to be variable at the moment.

Anyway, I have finished the last hat for Nanny, I think 6 should be sufficient to keep her going for a while 🙂

Last stripy hat

The background is a DK weight cotton I had lurking in the spare room, and I managed to use up the last of both colours of the Schachenmayr Princess. I think I have got the hat knitting thing out of my system now.

I had been going to start my mitred t-shirt which I did the tension square for ages ago, but I’ve been distracted again. It was knitting group on Wednesday and Audrey was showing us the method she used for making some jumpers using handspun. The idea being that you start at the centre bottom with 3 stitches, then on every other row you increase on each end of your piece, and on either side of the centre stitch until the base of the triangle is the width required for the body. Then you carry on increasing on either side of the centre stitch, but decrease at the sides every other row until you are up to the neckline, and then shape the neckline and shoulders.

I don’t spin, but I did think this would be a great way to use some lovely colours of DK cotton I have, without doing horizontal stripes. It will also cope well with the fact that I have lots of some colours and not much of others. I am hoping for a kind of random effect with the colours, and patterns. I’m not usually very good at doing random things so we shall see whether it comes out ok or not. It is really good fun so far. I am twiddling with Audrey’s original pattern in that once I have made my first triangle big enough width-wise I shall knit another the same, and then join them so that I can knit the bulk of the body circularly. I think I am going to make a V-neck, and I would like to somehow knit the sleeves on too, but I am still working through the logistics of that one. I had a thought about it the other morning just after the alarm clock went off, but I was rather asleep at the time so what seemed like a brilliant idea then may turn out to be rubbish. I’ve got a way to go before I need to worry too much about the sleeves though so plenty of time for inspiration to strike.

Anyway, here is a picture of what I have knitted so far.

Cotton jumper in progress

Did I mention I like bright colours? 🙂