A good day to be British...

Wasn't the Olympic opening ceremony fantastic? It even tops my previous favourite-ever Olympic ceremony (Sydney closing - prawns on bikes & every classic Aussie cliche you can imagine). As a knitter it was obviously good to see great British sheep involved.

I've recently joined Pinterest and have set up a Pattern Inspiration board for anything that my brain thinks might one day make a knitting pattern - lots of Olympic related ideas sloshing around. Feeling rather ahead of the new British cycling-obsessed curve after having started my pattern designing career with Pendleton and Cavendish. But what to do with Bradley Wiggins? Surely the man deserves celebrating with a knitting pattern.

Have sold a few patterns for Bartolome, earning the Galapagos Conservation Trust a grand total of £2.50 so far. I'll keep this blog updated with any more money I manage to raise. The second Queen of Cups pattern is advancing quite well & I think I will also put that up for sale rather than free download, and am considering appropriate charities to get a proportion of Queen of Cups proceeds.

Galapagos knits

We went on holiday to the Galapagos earlier this year, and as well as having a wonderful holiday I came back with lots of ideas for knitting patterns based on the animals and natural phenomena we saw.

I was inspired to start writing some of these up when I got the idea to sell the patterns and give a proportion of the sale costs  to the Galapagos Conservation Trust.

One of the most amazing places we saw was the island of Santiago where there is a huge expanse of swirling lava fields - like this:

So, I've been working out how to get something of a similar effect with knitting, perhaps using short row shaping. The first result of this is the Bartolome cowl, which isn't quite the full thing but uses the basic short row shaping technique to make swirly shapes. The next step will be to combine with a more textured knitting design to get a little closer to the lava.

I'm also looking at a mangrove shawl and of course some tortoise themed knits!

The cowl is available for £1 on Ravelry. 50p from each sale goes to the Galapagos Conservation Trust (and 24p to Paypal less charitably). I'm quite excited to have made my massive 4 sales so far, which is £2 for the Galapagos and £1.04 for me...

The Knitter's Curse...

I love a retro comedy song, and here's one about knitting!!!

The Knitter's Curse by The Savoy Ballroom

Well... as the Scissor Sisters would say... Ta-Daa!!

It seems I am finally a published author of a real knitting pattern in a real magazine ON PAPER and in WH Smiths and everything!!!! (I am too old to regard web publishing as real publishing.. with the greatest of respect to all the proper bloggers out there).

My Cecily Mitts are in Yarnwise issue 50. This is the magazine previously known as Knit and before that as Yarn Forward. It's been a bit of a saga as the magazine went into liquidation about 2 weeks after I sent in my pattern - I had some notion that this might be on the cards by then but had agreed the contract, and got terribly excited, before I realised how seriously wrong things were. So my parade has been well and truly rained on in this respect up until now.

However, the mag has now been bought by new publishers, totally unrelated to the old ones, and there's a great new team in place (well, the editor actually used to edit it a while ago, before the last owners got into "serious difficulty".... google rock and purl if you want the whole story...)

These are they. I haven't actually seen the mag yet but there should be proper lovely professional photography instead of my photo of my own moley arm...

You can see my pattern and all the other patterns in the new issue on Ravelry

There will also be a full update very soon on my "Queen of Cups" bra size pattern range... first pattern is now available & I'm in the planning stages for the second.