Knit your way to a healthy heart!

Speaking personally, I made a lot of my best friends when I was at university and one of them is the rather wonderful Alex, with whom I shared a hideous Young Ones style flat, all leaky pipes, no heating, overflowing ashtrays and interesting cultures growing in abandoned coffee mugs.

So when Alex announced that she, as part of Team Bob, would this June be walking 100km from London to Brighton to raise money for the British Heart Foundation, I had to help in the way I would most enjoy... designing a knitting pattern to raise some more funds for the walk, and help publicise it around those lovely generous knitting people.

I contacted the marvellous Jenny at Artesano Yarns, who provided yarn support in the gorgeous, squishy, warm shape of Artesano Aran, and designed a hat in the British Heart Foundation's colours, and finished it just in time to get it modelled by Alex when she came down for my 40th birthday party (part two) last weekend:

 

 

You can download it for £2.50 at http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bobs-beanie

 

All profits go to Team Bob (after PayPal take their cut...) and therefore to the British Heart Foundation.

 



All hail the mighty Bantams...

I've got a few things to talk about - most recently a trip to Nice which was absolutely jam packed with inspiration, as well as blue skies & cheese. I'm also approaching a "significant birthday" in a couple of days... ulp... had my first party (I'm having 2, Queen-style) on Friday. The winning combination of vast amounts of sparkling wine, cheese and classic 80s pop (99 Red Balloons, Tainted Love, etc) was good fun at the time but meant I spent yesterday feeling distinctly unwell (and occasionally saying things like, "I've just realised I had a Jagerbomb last night...")

I'm going to do a seperate Nice post - but what I've been doing is getting probably foolishly excited about Bradford City getting to the League Cup final on 24th Feb. If you're not a football fan you may not realise what a spectacular achievement this is - they're in League 2 and beat 3 Premiership sides, including Arsenal, to get to the final. So obviously I've had to design myself a hat to wear, and stray into the dangerous realms of stranded colourwork design.

The team logo is a Bantam, so it could be enjoyed by any random chicken lover. The pattern's free in my Ravelry store - Bantams Beanie

I will get a photo of it on my head, but it's too wet to go outside at the moment...

Hold the front page!!!!

Well, I'm chuffed, excited and thrilled to say Knit Now Magazine issue 17 is out, and my Talboys wrap is not only IN it, it's also ON THE FRONT COVER!!!

(c) Dan Walmsley for Practical Publishing

The wrap really started from my doing a lot of thinking about reversible cable patterns. Whether you could do it by cabling on either side (you can; I'm still looking for the right way to use this technique). I also did a bit of poking around on Ravelry, as you do, and the other way to do it is to cable in rib. So long as you're doing a straightforward single twist cable, this will look the same on both sides. It also looks rather architectural, which lead to me bringing my reversible-cable thoughts together with my book-themed thoughts.

Originally, these were based on Antonia Forest's Marlow family books, and their Elizabethan house, Trennels. It's more than likely that the Marlows will raise their heads in my knitting at some point in the future, but the reversible-cable / Tudor house thing then made me think of poor Harriet Vane's missing barley-sugar-twist chimneys in Dorothy L. Sayer's novel Busman's Honeymoon. Then I realised Tudor houses are rather suited to knitting, firm brickwork and lacy lattice mullioned windows. (They also tend to be a bit cold, which makes a cosy wrap a necessity, not a luxury!)

Naturally I was delighted when Knit Now were interested in my idea as this is only the second time I've had a pattern commissioned (the first being in the somewhat unusual circumstances surrounding the demise of Knit magazine and Phoenix-like rise of Yarnwise).

I had some trouble finding the right yarn - every time I came across one with the right sort of colour, it would turn out to be a discontinued shade - but then I found that Rico rather helpfully did one that was actually called Brick Red and even better, the yarn itself is a real delight to knit with, knitting up this commission certainly did not feel like work! I have to admit that the final thing spent some time being draped around me before I sorrowfully sent it off...

Christmas completions...

I knitted the sample ages ago, but today I finally got round to photographing and uploading another pattern inspired by the Galapagos Islands, the Santiago Cowl.

 

I was hoping to get a lovely sunny day to do the photos... but gave up on this.

It's got a similar construction to the Bartolome cowl (appropriately, as Bartolome is just off the coast of the much larger Santiago island), so anyone who buys the Santiago pattern will also get sent Bartolome free. It's £2 of which 50p goes to the Galapagos Conservation Trust.

I also knitted myself a Christmas present from Natural Dye Studio Schehezerade which is a spectacularly soft baby camel and silk blend - Ashley Knowlton's lovely Butterfly Forest Shawl pattern.

Isn't it nice when your patterns work?

My sister-in-law wants some fingerless gloves for driving for Christmas, so I knit her a pair of my Beaujolais fingerless mitts in Artesano Alpaca DK. It was a while since I wrote the pattern so I was delighted to discover it made sense and didn't seem to have any mistakes...

They're quite cute - I sort of want to keep them, which is always the problem I have with knitting presents!

Just been sent the PDF of my wrap pattern that is going in February's Knit Now magazine, which is all very exciting, and have finished a sample for the March issue, which is just waiting for me to get round to writing up the pattern, and doing all the tedious measuring bits.

On the subject of patterns working, so pleased to see the lovely version someone had made on Ravelry of my Black Beacon Scarf. It looks neater than my sample! The knitter in question is in Malaga - it feels sort of miraculous that someone in Spain is knitting a scarf pattern inspired by  my trips to East Anglia.

Went to my friend Andrew's wedding at the weekend (he's a very funny stand up comedian - you can follow him on Twitter at @theAndrewWatts). It involved a rather curious ceremony, being essentially a double-handed Christian/Jewish affair, with the priest and the rabbi acting in tandem. One minute Hebrew chanting - next minute "Bread of Heaven".

Being me, rather than taking photos of the happy couple, I took lots of the priest's rather magnificent vestments:

Wouldn't it make the most gorgeous colourwork sweater? Maybe by someone like Alice Starmore. Not quite sure my colourwork design skills are quite up there yet.

If this all sounds a bit too serious, I can assure you the grapey theme seen on the vestments was more than supported by the generous wine supply thereafter...

Added some weeks later: this very wedding was the subject of an article in the Sunday Times colour supplement on Jan 30th.

A bit late... but here's the Black Beacon scarf

Finally got a version of my Black Beacon scarf that I am happy with! The half hexagon pattern alternates stocking and reverse stocking stitch (so the scarf is fully reversible) and blocking does wonders for it - makes the hexagon patterns sit much flatter. My male model is in Hong Kong at the moment so it's being modelled by the garden bench:

It's available to download free from Ravelry.

A bit late for Wool Week here in the UK but apparently it's Dutch Wool Week at the moment so that's OK...