Easy Lace Workshop

I'm teaching an 'Easy Lace' Workshop at in Devon on Tuesday 23 March and there are stil some spaces available. The workshop will be covering everything you ened to get started on lace knitting. You'll learn how to knit from charts, how to work the various increases and decreases you need, how to use lifelines and stitch markers to control your lace knitting and how to shape your lace while keeping your lace pattern intact (how to shape within a lace pattern for armholes and necklines etc), and different types of lace shawls.

Contact the shop for details and to book. We start at 10am and finish at 4pm and a gorgeous lunch, refreshments and all materials are included. It's very rare for there to be any spaces this close to a workshop so call the shop today or Monday to book your space.

Hide that hook!

Someone take my crochet hooks and hide them please. I've been obsessed with crochet for the last couple of days. I've been crocheting motifs. Designing new ones and sketching for new crochet designs. I've got 3 designs almost ready to submit to magazines now. It's taken a lot of experimenting and ripping out. But that's what I love about motifs, they're small and don't take long so if you have to unravel because it doens't work, that's okay.

Only problem is I have a looming deadline for a knitdesign. And I'm not very keen on e-mailing the editor and telling her I won't get it done on time as I've become obsessed with crocheting. So this weekend I will try to resist the hook and get knitting. I took my knitting to knitting group yesterday and actually managed to get some knitting done. You may think a knitting group sounds like the kind of place you do knitting but our group is called 'Knit & Knatter' and I do more nattering than knitting most weeks. But yesterday I managed to get the edging on my current secret project finished and in the evenign I took my knitting to Em's swimming lesson and knitted for 1hr 30mins and a bit more when I got home before I had an early night. I managed to get several inches done and had hoped I'd get to the armholes tonight but I've been crocheting instead. so my aim for this weekend is to get the back finished (hopefully tomorrow) and get the front started and at least the edging (which is 4 inches) done. I'm teaching a workshop next week and attending another one so that'll mean less knitting.

There won't be shop update for about a week probably as I'm all out of stock right now, apart from a small amount of Super Merino and Merino Plus, and I'll be using some of that for Simon's machine knit sweater. I'm waiting for another batch of stock to arrive and hopefully it'll be here sometime next week. I may get some dyeing done on Wednesday or Thursday which means there may be an update next weekend sometime.

I've also been doing some machine knitting today. I forgot to take a photo before it got dark though. I've knitted the back of a sweater for myself. I'm using Araucania Ruca hwich is 100% sugarcane and gorgeous. It's dk weight and a little on the thick side for my machine so the fabric is a little bit denser than I'd like but I think it'll still have enough drape. I had planned to do a 10 cm border in tuckstitch using card 1. I swatched and although tuck stitch with such a thick yarn was a bit tricky it worked okay. But when I tried it last night it went wrong 3 times so I almost gave up. This morning I decided to try again and decided to still use tuck stitch but took out some needles. So I did 2 needles in work, 2 needles out and it created a very interesting fabric. Knitting with a yarn that's really a little too thick makes the knitting harder, pushing hte carriage across is harder work than with a thinner yarn. I made a slight mistake on the shoulder shaping but I'm hoping it won't show. I did proper back neck shaping and shortrow shoulder shaping which is something I didn't do on my first machine knit garment so I'm pleased I managed to tackle it successfully on teh first side today and a slight mistake on the second side.
I may try to knit the front tomorrow. Imagine a whole front or back knitted in one day (or actuall less than 2 hours, but because of my back/neck I've got to take breaks as 2 hours of non-stop machine knitting hurts too much. But the speed is amazing and that's why I love machine knitting. There is no way I've got time to knit myself any garment by hand right now so this is the only way I'm going ot be able to knit for myself. And learning a new skill is such good fun.

I've measured VAnessa and worked out the numbers for a sweater for her which I'll be starting next week. I've promised both Simon and Vanessa a sweater each before we go away on Easter Saturday so I've got to do Vanessa's next week and Simon's the week after. Vanessa is having a sweater similar to 'Mel' which was the alpaca sweater with the big cowl collar I did for Let's Knit back in teh autumn. Emily has the original and loves it. I'm doing Vanessa's in a 4ply merino wool as she wanted a lighter version.

Thank you to everyone who's complemented me on the new look. It's not quite finished yet. I need to sort out side bars etc and that will take some time and I don't have time to do it right now.

I've had a massage today and for some reason that makes me feel really tired a few hours afterwards and I've been struggling to stay awake this evening. So now it's nearly 9pm, I'm getting the girls to bed then I'm off to bed myself.

Have a nice weekend. HOpefully I'll have a picture of my machine knitting by Monday.

In Progress

I'm in the progress of changing my blog. Please bear with me while the changes take place.

Crochet and a bit of knitting

I'm in the middle of re-organising my blog. I've uploaded the new template but everything else needs sorting out so please bear with me.

I've been doing a lot of crochet for the last few days. I started this Curly Wurly scarf last week. I don't know how many hundreds of stitches I had in the end but it was a lot, the last row, which was double trebles, took me forever. I was very relieved when I finished at 10pm last night. The yarn is a merino/silk blend which I'm pretty sure is from Fyberspates (although it was unlabelled) and Ibought it from a bargain bin at Fibre Fest 3 or 4 years ago (the very first FibreFest). I've always loved this colourway and never quite known what to do with it. I had originally planned a shawl but then last week I decided to start a Curly Wurly scarf.
And here is the full length, I've not woven in the ends yet.
I've done some knitting too. I thought I might have managed to finish the Baby Surprise jacket over teh weekend but Iwas too distracted with the crochet. But I'm making good progress:
The yarn is Araucania Ruca (100% sugarcane) and it feels soft and silky. It's an easy knit and I've done several inches on it this morning as I'm incapable of coping with anything too taxing today.

I had a great day yesterday and got lots of pattern work done. I finished writing up two patterns, one was my Knitty submission. It took me most of the day and then at the end of all that, I did a shopupdate. That is an awful lot of computer work. I didn't think I'd be able to cope with it but I sat in my comfy armchair with the laptop on my lap and took regular breaks. it seemed to be going okay and I managed to finish what I had to do but last night I was suffering. I woke up about 3am and got up at 4am to take painkillers. I stayed up as I was in too much pain to stay in bed. By the time the girls left this morning I was in too much pain to sit in my comfy armchair too. So I took more painkillers and went back to bed. I read for a while but after an hour I was in too much pain to sleep. So I've tried to move around gently this morning and do some relaxing knitting. I'm in my comfy chair again with the laptop on my lap. At the moment i can't manage much more than 5 mins at the desk. it seems that the long time at the computer yesterday was too much for me after all.

As I spent so long on the two patterns which had to be finished yesterday i didn't manage to get the lace variety club ready for posting. I'm working on it today and it will be posted out tomorrow as I don't have the car today and there are too many parcels for me to carry to the post office. I have to walk into town later as Vanessa has doctors appointmetn after school and to be honest I'm not sure I can manage to walk in to town and back again the way my back is now.

Enough about my miserable back. It's made me feel quite down today but that's because the pain is bad and I'm very, very tired.

I've started working on my next secret project. I ran through the calculations quickly in the early hours of this morning and started knitting then realised it looked far too wide. So a quick re-jig of the numbers and I'm ready to start again. This is another summer knit in a gorgeous summer yarn I've never used before. I'm definitely changing my mind about this summer knitting. Being from Norway, I'm a winter knitting type of person and found designing for summer a bit of a challenge but I'm loving it now. There are so many gorgeous summer yarns out there. I'm not a cotton lover although some of the new cottons are very good. Now there is so many other summery blends out there.

Magazines and crochet

Since finishing my Let's Knit projects on Wednesday I've been on a bit of a crochet kick but more about that later. First, let's take a lookat the magazines which have landed on my door mat this week.

We've got Yarn Forward and Let's Knit:
Both are brilliant issues this time. I've struggled to tear myself away from them.

My design for Let's Knit this month was the pretty 'Laurel' cardigan which features leafy lace edgings.
You knit the bottom edging first then pick up stitches and knit the body in one piece to the armholes. The front borders are knitted together with the body. I took some pics before sending the sample off but it was on the hard-drive we lost (which we've now found out has been wiped so there is no hope of gettin any files off it). The cardi came back last week but before I had time to take pics of it, Sarah (editor of Let's Knit) e-mailed me asking if I could send it back as she'd been asked to contribute some designs to a fashion show and she wanted to use Laurel. I'll take some pics when it comes back again.
And for Yarn Forward this month, we have 'Katarina' which is a very simple tunic. I think stocking stitch is the best way to show off the gorgeous, vibrant, variegated Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend colourways. Around the v-neck it has a stocking stitch edging in purple which is allowed to roll in naturallly. The pics I took of this design before sending it off have also been lost and I won't be getting this one back as Yarn Forward don't return designs.
I started a Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmerman last week. This is my first baby surprise jacket and I've wanted to knit it for a long time now. I meant to knit one when my sister had her last baby but was too busy to get it done at the time.

I'm using the gorgeous, silky Araucania Ruca which is 100% sugarcane. And I just fell in love with this colourway. I love it so muc hthat I ordered enough to knit a sweater for myself on the knitting machine.

I've done a few more rows than this now. I took this picture to show a friend how to place the markers. She's knitting the jacket too for her daughter in law but as she'll need me to coach her through the pattern and as it's not a very logical pattern I thought I may have more luck guiding her through it if I knit one myself.
Most of my time for the last couple of days have been spent crocheting. I've worked on a couple of new motif designs which may or may not be submitted to mags. Here they are hiding behidn my pink yarn:
Last night I started working on this project:
The yarn has been sitting around for a while now and it's unlabelled but I htink I got it from Fyberspates at hte very first FibreFest 3 years ago. It's a merino/silk singles and I think it was a yarn that Jeni had tried but decided not to stock. I grabbed 2 skeins of this gorgeous colourway but have never decided what to do with it. So last night I grabbed it and started to crochet. Not decided whtehr or not this will be a secret project or not yet.

Let's Knit was very kind to mention my Friendship Shawl fundraising for Shelterbox. There is something wrong with my fundraising widget at the moment. I'm not sure what's happened or whether or not it's possible to donate but I've e-mailed Just Giving. If you've tried donating and not been able to, please come back next week or go directly to Shelterbox to donate.
I think I mentioned that I'd knitted a cashmere waistcoat on my knitting machine. Well here it is:
Not managed to get modelled photos yet but here is the back view on my dress form. It's made to fit me and I'm a rather large size 24 and the dress form is about a size 10. I used tuck stitch no 3 and the waist coat is knitted in one piece (a large rectangle) from side to side with holes for the arms. The challenge for me was to put stitches on hold while I knitted eachside of the armholes and then brining the needles back into work and not drop any stitches. This may be easy in hand-knitting but is rather hcallening in machine knitting but I managed it without a problem. My next machine projects are the sugarcane top for me, a sweater each for Simon and Vanessa (both before Easter) and a cardigan or waist coat for me.

Finally some yarn!

Finally, a shop update. I've been trying to get around to doing this update all week but for lots of reasons it's not happened till now. Instead I've lived with a box of yarn in the lounge. Although I don't mind looking at pretty yarn the rest of hte family are not so keen on it. You can see today's new yarns here. I've also had a bit of a stock take in the last week and found several odd skeins which I htought were already listed in the shop but for some reason they had been left out so they've been added today too.

The main additions today are some Amazing Cashmere Lace in these gorgeous colourways plus a couple of others. I'm using a new base yarn for the Amazing Cashmere Lace. It's very similar to the old base yarn but instead of getting it from China and paying a small fortune in shipping costs, I'm buying it from a British supplier. It's still gorgeous and soft but this new version feels more silky and has a slight sheen to it. It has 400m per 50gr skein so slightly more yarn than the old version. If you fancy any of these yarns, be quick. They've already started selling out while I've been doing the update.
Another new base yarn is the new BFL sock yarn. Again I've changed the base yarn but kept hte name the same. This new bluefaced leicester sock yarn is softer and plumper than the old one and I much prefer it. I've not knitted wiht this new yarn yet but I've been crocheting with it and it's gorgeous. Here are the colourways so far. There will definitely be more of this in the future.
And I've got a 100gr plait of Falkland Merino to list too. I dyed it for myself to blend with my natural grey merino but it's not qutie the right grey. It's gorgeous though. I've not done too much fibre dyeing, mainly because the ones I've done have not come out like I wanted. But there will be more fibre very soon.
As I said above, I've done some crocheting but I've also done lots of knititng over the last couple of days. Actually yesterday it was mainly computer work, catching up on pattern writing. Then in the evening Emily and I went to a basket ball game in Plymouth with two friends and their daughters who are a year younger than Emily. Plymouth Raiders were playing Worcester Wolves. Worcester lead for much of the game but right at the end Raiders re-gained the lead and won the game. There was high emotions amongst the players at the end and there was nearly a punch up on hte court and one Raiders player got expelled. But apart from that it was all good fun. We went to 2 or 3 basket ball games last year and it's really good family fun. Very lively.

I knitted through the whole game and managed to do several inches on my current secret knitting. I'm into one piece circular knits right now. Several of my designs for hte summer are knitted in one piece with varous forms of circular constructions. I'm very keen to keep exploring circular, one piece knitting so hopefully there will be lots more of this to come soon. I'm also really looking forward to knitting with some great new summery yarns over the next few months. Some of them are brand new to me.

Now, go and check out the shop update. A huge thank you to Sock Variety Club members who have been very patient. I've finally manage to re-compile my club list after loosing all my members' info when our laptop died the other week. The parcels will be going out tomorrow or Tuesday. And it's nearly Lace Variety Club time too. I'm hoping to dye the yarn on Wednesday and it'll be posted next Monday, so join now.

Shelterbox update

Thank you to everyone who's donated to my Shelterbox appeal so far. If you wish to donate and download the free Friendship Shawl click here. The boxes provided by Shelterbox are fantastic. There is a tent and basic living equipment for an extended family and it's all provided in a box. I've seen these boxes and it's quite amazing everything that fits in them as they're not very big boxes. Shelterbox provided boxes after the earthquake in Haiti and they're currently providing boxes in Chile after the earthquake there the other day. I've also seen they're providing boxes in Peru after a landslide. I'm not sure if hte landslide was as a result of the earthquake off the coast of Chile. But responding to several major diasters so close together must be a big job for them so help them out by making a donation please. Thank you very much.

I thought this week would be a quiet week for me to recover and catch up with some work after my Mum left. It's been far from quiet but I have caught up with some work. I didn't get much knititng done over the weekend. On Friday my left shoulder was in agony and the pain was radiating down my left arm which doesn't happen very often fortunately but it made knitting difficult. On Saturday morning I went to put a load in the tumble dryer and bashed my thumb, bending it, and it's still slightly sore now. I was quite worried straight away and started running through what a disaster it would be if I broke it and couldn't knit. I soon realised it wasn't broken, just rather sore. But it meant that I had to abandon some more complicated knitting over the weekend and get started on some simpler stuff.

That in turn meant I had to spend Monday working flat out to finish the Artesano designs, which I'd hoped to finish on Friday. I then had some submissions for next autumn/winter to work onto meet a magazine deadline. I'd hoped to submit about 6 designs but only managed 4 in the end. I finally finished getting my submissions together about 4.50pm yesterday, just in time to get to hte post office before the last post went at 5.15.pm.

I've still got some more autumn/winter submissions to work on for other magazines but my main knitting now has moved on to summer designs. I've never been all that keen on 'summer yarns' which always used to be cotton. Cotton has never been my favorite fibre but some of the new cottons these days are rather yummy. And there are all these new blends like linen blends, milk cotton, soya cotton, bamboo and sugar cane. I love some of these new fibres. They won't replace my favorite animal fibres but I certainly love knitting with these fibres. I find it hard to knit up a design in a yarn I don't like. I've done it once or twice and I'm sworn I won't do it again. I won't say which the last one was as it's not been published yet but I hated every single stitch. I liked the design and would have loved knitting it in another yarn but I did not like the yarn. But it was a yarn I agreed to use without having swatched with it first.

My current summer design is knitted in Rowan Lenpur and it's gorgeous. I'm doing a couple of designs for different magazines in Lenpur and i'm very keen to knit a top for myself in this yarn. not sure if I'll have time though.

One of the best things about designing knitwear, apart from not feeling guilty about knitting all day, is that yarn companies and magazines send you yarn. Lots of gorgeous yarn. I've had all these gorgeous parcels land on my door step lately. Some of it I've no idea what is for as sometimes editors change the yarn choice and colour from my original suggestion. So I need to make some e-mails to work out what's for what but it's all very gorgeous and I can't wait to knit it all up.

I've got no knitting I can share but I'll try and fit in some bloggable kniting over the next few days. I was going to do a shot update on Monday but I've not had time yet. so I'm hoping to fit in a shop update this afternoon. I've got some BFL sock yarn and some new Amazing Cashmere Lace to list. Gorgeous colours. It's all photographed. I just need time to sit down and edit the photos and do the listings. So check back later.