Happy 70th, Mr F.

After my extremely good lunchtime fish-and-chips (the benefit of working in a traditional institution on a Friday! And they home-make their tartare sauce, too...) I went off to read the papers; someone was already reading the Grauniad so I ended up with the Indy instead. Don't know about you, but if I'm knitting as well as reading, I tend to absorb more including the ads, because I'm loath to stop and turn the page - so I read the birthday column today, and found that the Grand Panjandrum of colour, Kaffe Fassett, is 70 today. Which has dragged me out of my long blog-silence.

Does anyone remember a series in the Times in about 1983-4 about knitting? They had contributions from Richard Rutt, and Elizabeth Zimmermann... And the pattern for the Toothed Stripe sweater which later appeared in Glorious Knitting; which blew my mind with its sheer simplicity - no 'you will not get the expected results if you do not use X-brand yarn', no 'blue with green should not be seen', just sheer, wild, rich colour. I was about 17 at the time and I haven't put down the needles since...

So, happy birthday, Mr F. I know there are many more universally revered figures in the knitting world, including Mrs Zimmermann, but that was my personal Knitting Can Alter the Way the World Spins on its Axis moment... And I don't give a damn which way you weave your ends in; or if you do.

So some colour. A very good excuse to show you the fabulously bright skeins I got at the Secret Santa exchange at the knitting group at Liberty last night... Handspun merino!

Not entirely sure how much there is in each skein, but it looks to be about 4-ply weight, so I think there's enough to do a really decent splash of colour against the background of some of the dourer (and we're talking Gordon Brown just after Prime Minister's Questions dour) colours in the stash... They're from Victoria; but I only know Victoria from a couple of evenings at Lib's so I don't know whether they're her handspun or not!

(Nic and baby Pete were also there, first time I'd met him, and he was lovely and they were both looking extremely well...)

And a bit more monotone, but this is why I've been AWOL for the last two weeks - steeling myself to do some stitch samples for a class tomorrow.

I've not done a lot of stitching over the last few months (and frankly for a while before that), but it's Christmas so something ornamenty for this four-hour workshop... These will become a 6-petalled poinsettia-like object (no, I haven't counted how many petals/leaves a poinsettia has; and no, I don't care...), once the final petal is complete...

My personal favourite is at the front of this photo... shame I managed to get my personal least favourite in focus at the back, but that's trying to do flash-free photography after a long, hard week for you (in the sense of there is so much to learn and I need to turn myself into some sort of sponge and just absorb all of this while coming up with some seriously good ideas every now and then to justify my existence, rather than actually difficult, in the former sense of I am mindblowingly bored and under-rated but I am still a professional so I will attempt to derive some satisfaction from the minutiae of the daily process; I still have the sense that someone wrote a job description for me and it would be crazy not to fill it!)

I'm off to write up the instructions for all those petals now...

Have other things to show - probably on Sunday as I'm off to view (as yet blogless) Sue's new, and hard-won flat tomorrow night after teaching; if I'm still sentient... Otherwise I'll go and see it anyway; I have a housewarming present and bottle of pink fizz to impart, after all...

(And if anyone's bothered reading this far, and has worked this out - is it just me, or is getting paragraph formatting to work in New Blogger a serious pain? Editing the HTML really doesn't seem to work all that well either!)