Maltingly good!

Last year, when I first came to Unravel, the fabulous knitting festival at Farnham Maltings, I didn't really know what to expect. It had come highly recommended by my knitting friend Mandy, but I hadn't had much experience of knitting festivals other than a slightly underwhelming visit to Olympia. I was also mid my bout of vestibulitis (in fact before I'd really been diagnosed) and not altogether enthusiastic about crowds/standing up. I drove down, feeling I have to say as if I was not  altogether well enough to do so, and managed to get lost, arrived in the Wagon Yard carpark around lunchtime and found myself a space.

Once I entered I found myself in a brave new world of knitting gloriousness. A day and a half later I left laden with yarny loveliness and having even managed to do a workshop on dyeing (therefore also slightly laden with dye). A year and a few hand-dyed skeins later and my anticipation was MUCH greater.

I arrived earlier, partly due to being rather healthier and partly because this year I wanted to try & get it all done in one day - Bradford City having rather unexpectedly made the League Cup final on the Sunday. It had proved utterly impossible to get tickets for the match itself but I still had to be safely home and on the sofa (clad in my Bantams Beanie) by 3.30 and with one thing and another Sunday wasn't looking terribly practical for Unravelling. I wasn't doing a workshop this year either - would have loved to do the needlefelt hare workshop but it was all booked up by the time I looked at it. I arrived in Farnham pretty much exactly as the last space in the Maltings carpark went, so my first 10 minutes were spent finding somewhere else to park. The next 15 mins were spent walking to the Maltings, coming in, buying a coffee, panicking I hadn't locked my car & walking to the car & back to check. (It was locked. I am not as stupid as I think I am.)

The good thing about this is that I did get to say hello to the Well Manor Farm sheep outside the Maltings three times.

The place was PACKED. It felt MUCH busier than last year. I had arranged with myself to do one complete circuit before I bought anything, examining the produce and getting my little notebook and doing various bits of maths as to how much it would cost to make various garments and planned projects. Some rooms were virtually impossible to navigate, and some stalls I couldn't get close to.

However, the Unravel crowds are some of the nicest you could hope to find yourself crushed up against! There was also the chance to see how many people's sweaters I recognised from their project pages on Ravelry (particularly excited to see the person I guess was Rhian Drinkwater in her Dalek Fyberspates Challow). Met up with my friend Mandy at lunchtime - she had been on Alison Ellen's workshop in the morning and had been nearly expiring with excitement about this for some weeks.

My favourite stall, probably, was Well Manor Farm aka the Little Grey Sheep. I had made myself the nicest shawl from their Gotland Aran last year (which I wore throughout Unravel with pride) and was keen to use the same yarn to make Ann Kingstone's Hild. I had checked the yarn weight before the show and it seemed to be fractionally too heavy - but on looking at the stall it seems they've got a new spinner and the yarn should now knit as exactly the right tension. If anything it's also even more lustrous and touchable than it used to be (I know this, as I spend the Bradford City game winding it into balls). It also smells gloriously, unashamedly sheepy - if you spotted someone standing in the foyer inhaling yarn during Unravel, that was me.

Some places, I just couldn't make my mind up. Despite declaring my intention to purchase Fyberspates Vivacious, I found I could no more make my mind up at Unravel than I could in I Knit last week. Nor could I settle on what exactly I wanted or would do with Elisabeth Beverley's gorgeous plant dyed merino and cashmere. Instead I bought some new stuff, or stuff I hadn't seen before - sparkly pink and grey yarn from A Stash Addict, delicate handspun rose-coloured sock yarn from Shearer Girl, and a couple of skeins of the spendidly-named Buffy from Juno Fibre Arts. (Can I design socks with stakes and crosses? Surely someone has done this already.) Plus a bit of UK Alpaca. I was also very impressed by the handsome range of beads at Moon Beads (some of which found their way home with me).

The final stop of the day was at Judy Hardman's stall, where Mandy, who has taken up spinning (hence lucky old me got a hand spun/dyed skein for my birthday) purchased the fleece of a sheep called Bertie, which needed to be transported back to Hanwell while she had me & the car, and therefore no need for Bertie to impart his aroma to others on the train. Although I strongly suspect the trains out of Farnham that day would have had a little scent of sheep...

Pom-Pommery and my first yarn love...

Making the pompom for Bob's Beanie was quite a nostalgic experience; I realised I probably haven't made one for about 30 years... I remember a time when my sister & I were obsessed with making them (or was it just me?) probably because they were dead easy and didn't involve any PATIENCE, unlike knitting! I haven't got the faintest idea what we did with all these pompoms.

I know I did occasionally manage to knuckle down and finish a project for someone bigger than a Sindy - I remember making booties for a cousin, and a whole Postman Pat intarsia sweater for another cousin. Not that I had the foggiest what intarsia was or how to do it. I dread to think what an unholy mess the finished object probably was. However, I tried to make some legwarmers for myself in the early stages of secondary school (humour me, it was the 80s) and never finished them because I found the 2x2 rib too boring. I would polish them off in an afternoon now! The yarn was fantastic though - bright green with a multcoloured slub running through it. I think I only knitted as much as I did for the joy of getting to the fattest bits of slub. I've got no idea what it was called and where it came from. I've still got bits of it left, mostly in tiny, sometimes unravelled balls and it's been used in various mini-projects and so forth over the years. Even now, looking at my gorgeous stash with Qiviut, alpaca, silk, BFL, hand-dyed little somethings etc, that green, almost certainly acrylic, oh-so-80s yarn still inspires feelings of love.

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.