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New Pattern! The Beauty of the Rain Shawl
New Pattern! The Beauty of the Rain Shawl
It’s taken a while but I’m pleased to say that my new shawl design The Beauty of the Rain is now up on Ravelry :) This design was born after a visit to The Sheep Shop in Cambridge and the purchase of some Lotus Yarns Tibetan Cloud yarn in the delicate Cornflower Haze colour. The yarn is 100% yak and sooo soft, it’s a dream to knit with. I had recently done a swatch of the Starlight Lace pattern…
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The Great London Yarn Crawl
The Great London Yarn Crawl
Last weekend I joined with fellow yarnies and took part in the Great London Yarn Crawl. Organised by Yarn in the City the event has been running for 4 years now and it’s a day for crafters to take a tour of some of the wonderful haberdashery and yarn shops that London has to offer. There were 12 teams this year, each with a planned route to visit 3 or 4 shops. I was on Team Mosaic, one of the 4…
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…I’ve missed you! Regular readers will know that just one post a month is not unusual for me but in between I do try and keep up with reading your lovely blogs and I’m sorry I have been MIA and not stopping by to say hello. I had every intention of checking in after hols but the longer I left it the more I put it off as I knew how much I had to catch up on…But it’s time to bite the bullet and jump back in! So I hope you will forgive me if I haven’t stopped by for a while, I hope to rectify some of that over the next few days.
So although I have been out of action in blogland I can assure you my knitting needles have been very much in action. Do you want to see what I have been working on? Yes? Oh good, I hoped you would say that!
First up – holibobs! We had an amazing 2 and a half weeks on the beautiful Greek island of Alonissos. It was pretty much the perfect getaway with lots of sunshine, reading, beach times and of course, knitting :) I got into a lovely routine of getting up each morning and spending an hour or so knitting on the veranda. Bliss…
I took 4 projects with me, the Ilene Bag that I didn’t quite manage to get finished before we went away, the Happenstance Shawl, the double knit Kitty Cushion and a new design that I had started working on.
Ilene Bag
The Ilene Bag by Hannah Ingalls is a great pattern, it’s a simple k2tog, yo lace pattern worked in the round and the finished bag was perfect for beach essentials! And it’s a free pattern on Ravelry too :) I just had a few rows at the top and the handle to finish when I got there but that only took a few mornings to do.
I would have preferred a slightly longer strap, but I ran out of yarn – but it has stretched a bit with use. This is a great pattern, well written and easy to follow. I already have another one on the needles which will be a Christmas present :)
Happenstance
This is a lovely pattern by Romi Hill from the Kate Davies Book of Haps. I cast on using Moorfields Alpaca yarn and it was my travel project for the journey to Greece. As soon as we arrived, instead of unpacking we headed out to the veranda to take in the last of the evening sun over a glass of wine – and a few more rows :)
Over the next few days I even managed to knit some of it in the paddling pool!
Until disaster struck….and I ran out of yarn!
So then it was onto the next project, and time to learn how to double knit!
Kitty Cushion
As soon as I saw this super cute pattern by Nicky Barfoot I knew it wouldn’t be long before I cast on. The only thing that held me back for a while was the fact that I had never done double knitting before but I figured that holiday would be the perfect time to get to grips with it . Armed with a free Basic Double Knitting Ravelry tutorial by Cassie Castillo I cast on a small swatch to practice on first. It turns out it was nowhere near as complicated as I had built it up to be, so I jumped in and before long this little face began to emerge.
I I found it helpful to place stitch markers at each colour change, just to keep track. He is now off the needles and ready to be blocked and sewn together this weekend.
As for my new design, that didn’t get very far…it wasn’t going to plan and I didn’t have my laptop to work out the changes so this is now frogged and its back to the drawing board!
So that’s what I have been up to. What about you? It’s time to put the kettle on and find out!
Hello! Knit’s Been a While… ...I've missed you! Regular readers will know that just one post a month is not unusual for me but in between I do try and keep up with reading your lovely blogs and I'm sorry I have been MIA and not stopping by to say hello.
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Knitting Pretty
I’ve had lots of lovely knitting time lately, June has been a quiet month compared to the May madness, so without further ado here is what has been occupying my needles of late :) First up, the Helix socks are FINISHED!! I stayed up late last night to be able to cast them off and block them this weekend. So here they are pre-blocked. I am so happy with how these turned out, it felt like they had…
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May...The Month That
May…The Month That
…And this is why I can’t do weekly posts, I can’t even keep up with the monthly’s haha! Let me cast my mind back and round up the month that was May :) Ely Cathedral My Mum and her friend are keen photographers so when they mentioned getting together for a photography day I jumped at the chance. We decided to visit the pretty Cathedral City of Ely in Cambridgeshire. It was a beautiful day so we…
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Note to Self. Remember to Make Notes!
Note to Self. Remember to Make Notes!
Last year I visited the Sheep Shop in Cambridge and came away with 2 skeins of the most gorgeous Lotus Tibetan Cloud 100% yak laceweight yarn. It’s sooo soft and dreamy I just couldn’t resist! I knew right away that it wanted to be a pretty little shawl and thought I would have another go at designing a pattern. I decided to make a thin crescent shape shawl, one that increases 4 sts at the…
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A Weekend in Porto
A Weekend in Porto
Last weekend Mr. A and I were in the beautiful city of Porto, Portugal. Mr. A won the trip organised by his employer Peugeot as part of the ‘Guild of Gold Lion Dealers’ scheme, designed to recognise and reward the top 30 UK Peugeot dealers in the UK! Thursday After meeting some of the other winners in Gatwick on the Thursday morning we boarded a plane and arrived at our hotel ‘The Yeatman’ in the…
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And yet another month flies by! April was a fun month, and although there was slow progress on any knitting it was all for good reason. So here we go, April: the month that…
We Had a Party
April was kickstarted with Mr. A’s birthday BBQ on the first bank holiday weekend. Luckily for us the sun shined for most of the day and we celebrated with friends and one or two drinks. We made a summer cocktail in our new drinks dispenser (a Christmas present from Mr. A’s parent’s) which went down very well!
As much as I love a good party I always under estimate the amount of prep work and tidying that has to be done beforehand. As such my crafty ‘workstation’ in the kitchen had to be dismantled and temporarily boxed up to free up the kitchen table. So that meant very little knitting for a whole week! On the upside, the kitchen had never been so clean and sparkly😉
We Looked at Lady Sheds
I have always dreamed of having my own craft room as knitting in the kitchen isn’t ideal, especially when we need the kitchen table! Add to that I have books and skeins of yarn stashed away all over the place, it would be sooo nice to have somewhere more permanent to set up station! So Mr. A and I got talking as lately he has been thinking about getting into woodwork and learning to use a lathe. Add to that that the garden is in need of a bit of a makeover and I think we may have found a solution….our very own garden log cabin studio / workshop!
This is the kind of thing we are thinking of:
It has 2 separate compartments so Mr. A can set up his lathe in the shed end and I could have my very own craft room in the pretty summerhouse end! I’m trying not to get my heart set on anything as we still have to work out the costings and our garden isn’t massive so we need to think about space, but we did go to a local dealer and have a look round some options. They even had a similar model on display so we were able to get a better feel for it.
Wouldn’t THAT be amazing! It would be small – but it would be bigger than a kitchen table😉
I Discovered that Knitting can be Bad for the Diet
Work saw me travel up to Manchester in April and rather than drive I saw 3.5 hours on a train as valuable knitting knitting time. And boy did I knit, I cast on a sock at the beginning of the journey and managed to knit the leg and the heel flap by the time I got to Manchester Piccadilly!
However I did consume a hot chocolate, a kit kat and a chocolate cookie on my travels – I don’t think that’s any coincidence when the yarn looks good enough to eat, haha! I never saw knitting as bad for the diet before but now I’m starting to wonder…
I pretty much finished this sock on the return journey. It’s a shame the 2nd sock hasn’t been such a quick affair, it’s been over a month in the making and I have only just turned the heel!
We went to the Handel & Hendrix House
Mr. A and I do love a day out in London and as Mr. A is a keen musician and guitarist we decided to check out the Handel & Hendrix house in Mayfair. Handels house, 25 Brook Street, was opened as a museum in 2001 and showcases carefully restored Georgian period rooms on the first and second floors. More recently the space in the adjoining house number 23, has been opened up as a museum to celebrate the time Jimi Hendrix spent there in the 1960’s.
Left: Handels Rehearsal and Performance Room – Almost all his works after 1723, amongst them many of his best-known operas, oratorios and ceremonial music, were composed and partially rehearsed in the house, which contained a variety of keyboard instruments, including harpsichords, a clavichord and a small chamber organ (text taken from Wikipedia)
Right: Handels bedroom (where he is believed to have died).
Up the stairs, Jimi Hendrix’s flat used to be used as admin offices for the Handel’s House until it was opened as a museum earlier this year. The exhibition documents his time spent in London during 1968-69 when he lived there with his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham. Unlike Handel’s House there was only one room recreated to show what it would have looked like when he lived there and that was the bedroom.
Every item in the room had been sourced and curated based on photographs taken at the time of his residence. It was so well done, it almost felt as if he was going to step back into the room at any moment.
And check out this giant knitted dog bear given to him by a fan. How cool is he!
The rest of the flat had been turned into exhibition space, full of photos, records and memorabilia of his time there. On walking out there was just a small framed newspaper cutting announcing his death – it was a very poignant end to the celebration of his short time in London.
We ‘Cooked’ Cocktails in an RV
From Mayfair we hotfooted it over to Shoreditch as we had tickets to a pop up breaking Bad themed bar in Shoreditch! If you have seen the show you may recognise this…
At 6pm the doors opened and about 20 of us piled into the RV to begin a ‘cooking session’. We were seated at our table and instructed to put on our protective clothing…
And the cooking began!
We were given a base cocktail made with our spirit of choice (we went for gin). The first one up was a ‘505’ made with lychee, rose, maple martini and gin – but it was down to us to add the dry ice smoke infusion!
Oh my, it was delicious!
Next up was the ‘Fly’ – gin with cranberry caviar, creme de mure, xanthum gum and a few other things I can’t recall…
And this one used a whipper to infuse it with nitrogen cavitation!
Yum.
Finally we had ‘the cocktail that changes flavour’. We were given a really sharp citrussy cocktail, so sour that it made me wince. We were instructed to take a sip and then pop the pill (the pill being a berry fruit pill that miraculously turns sour things into sweet)
What a difference, the cocktail tasted amazing from thereon and we could even suck the lemon wedges without pulling funny faces haha!
So that was April, it turned out to be a rather boozy affair – and a lot of fun!
I’ll be back soon with more knitty posts as the needles have been very busy of late
Have a great week whatever you get up to! x
April: The month that… And yet another month flies by! April was a fun month, and although there was slow progress on any knitting it was all for good reason.
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Whipping up the WIP's
Whipping up the WIP’s
With knitting I used to be very much in the mindframe of ‘I’ve started it so I’ll finish’ but recently I have realised the merits of having a number of projects on the needles… Grab and Go Knitting Ever since I made my first pair of aran weight socks in January I have been addicted. The pattern is easy to follow and because they are made in aran weight yarn they are quick to whip up! Now I am…
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Putting a Spin on Knit
Putting a Spin on Knit
I have been interested in learning how to spin on a spindle since I saw the Spin City stall at Festiwool last November and Louise, the owner, was kind enough to give us a quick demonstration. I was tempted to buy one there and then but I held off as I had a lot of other projects to be getting on with that the time. So when my friend (and podcaster extraordinaire) Vero mentioned doing a spinning…
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#Beautifying March #Instagram
One of my ‘things to do in 2016’ is to learn more about photography and back in January I signed up to do a ‘Photography for Knitting & Crochet Course’ with Emily Quinton at Makelight. However, due to unforeseen circumstances the course was rescheduled to March and I couldn’t attend as it clashed with the C&G knitting weekend. So instead I signed up to take one of the Makelight online…
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March: The month that...
March: The month that…
Hello! This year I am writing a monthly post on things that wouldn’t always warrant a full blog post. Inspired by the weekly ‘Sunday Seven’s’ devised by Nat at Threads and Bobbins the series is a great way to share little moments by posting 7 pictures of your week and letting people know what you have been up to. As much as I enjoy reading other blogger’s Sunday Sevens I’m just not disciplined…
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C&G Knitting Weekend
A couple of weekends ago I spent some time in Portsmouth in the company of some of the other students doing the City & Guilds Hand Knitting Course. The C&G hand knitting courses level 2 and level 3 are run by Fiona Morris at Distance Knitting and they are designed to teach practical knitting and design skills and techniques. I have been stuck on module 5 for quite some time, having come to a…
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February: The month that...
February: The month that…
Honestly, where does the time go?! It’s already mid-way through March and it’s been non-stop! Not that that’s a bad thing as I have been up to some rather fun things. This weekend was spent in the company of some of the other students who are doing the City & Guilds knitting course. I will tell you all about it in my next blog post as it really was a lot of fun, and also gave me the kick I need…
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Adventures in Iceland!
Last weekend Mr. A, a couple of friends and I took a trip to the beautiful Country of Iceland. We took off from London on Thursday morning and arrived 3 hours later, stepping off the plane into a flurry of snow – boy was I glad I had packed all the knits into the hand luggage! We decided before the trip that we would rent a car as our hotel was outside of Reykjavik city centre and it would give…
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Norrland Hat and Future Socks
Norrland Hat and Future Socks
I have a FO to show you… My finished Norrland Hat! I am so pleased with the way this turned out and it was a fun knit too. The pattern was charted and easy to follow although I did keep having to frequently stop to untwist the yarns. For the sky I used Knit Pick’s Stroll Fingering weight yarn in the colourway Deep Waters, it varies from a dark plum purple to rich royal blue to navy. And for the…
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Hats and Socks
It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the needles. One of my projects has been making the Farm Beanie hat for M. A ahead of our upcoming trip to Iceland. It’s a nice pattern and easy to memorise which meant it was great for train knitting. It was also relatively quick to make, which was a good job as I ended up making it twice! I made the largest size at first, but it was sooo big and baggy that…
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