Garden Party

It's certainly a bit too cold for most of the UK this weekend for a Garden Party. We don't have snow here in Cornwall but I think a lot of the country had snow yesterday. Although it's cold it doesn't mean you can't dream about a garden party though.

 These pics were taken a week ago on a very chilly, very sunny January day, and although Sarah was freezing most of the time it does look summery, doesn't it? The Garden Party Shawl was first published in Knitting magazine in the summer of 2010 for a garden party themed issue.

 The shawl is a top down triangular shawl with trellis diamonds. It's a fairly easy stitch pattern and it's charted and written out. Perfect as a first laceweight shawl as it's knitted in a heavier laceweight. You'll need 800m/880yds per 100gr skein.

 Thank you to Sarah for modelling this shawl for me. We did the photoshoot at Mount Edgecumbe in Cornwall overlooking Plymouth and the Plymouth Sound. For some reason I love photos shot on the beach.

 If you start knitting this shawl now, you'll be able to wear it for a garden party this summer. As you can see it looks perfect with a casual top and jeans but it looks equally fab with a pretty summer dress.

 Come on, you know you want to. Get the pattern here.

I've been working hard this week on setting up my first online classes. Yesterday we shot the videos for the first class. I've decided to run the Continental Knitting workshop first as it's a fairly easy workshop to run form a teachers point of view. It's also a very popular class. Not sure what Continental Knitting is? Take a look at this video  (ETA: new link added) to find out why you need to take this class (by the way I can knit faster than that but not while I'm being filmed & talking at the same time. Oh and my girls thought I had a stronger accent on the video than I do in real life and that I was using my 'phone voice'. I was hoping I was using my teaching voice, maybe they're the same. If you want to take this class in person with me instead I'm teaching it in May at Spin A Yarn, Devon. More details on my online class coming soon. It's not quite ready yet.