I Knit Day, part 2

More photos.

But first - Anne and I appeared on the Yarn Harlot's blog!! Scroll down for the "washcloth" part of the parade - thanks, Anne, for letting me accompany you and your washcloth...

And here's a photo taken by the lovely E-J of us meeting Stephanie - this is possibly the best one as neither of us look too actively deranged or stalkerish at the time...

Also, note Stephanie's co-ordinated Manon and waterproof jacket. That's classy and shows forethought. E-J's also managed to capture Gerard checking in at the bookstall, illustrating how much both of the I Knit guys were darting around on the day making sure everything stayed organised, and it really did, so much so that you didn't really notice (except for noticing how fast they were moving around the place)...

The rest of the photos (of shopping) are less good - we're getting into the time of year where I don't get much natural light at the best of times either side of the working day, and the weather yesterday (all weekend, really) was atrocious. So imagine these yarns and then please think of the colours as 2000% nicer. The only as-yet-unphotographed item (I'd cast on socks onto them by the time I got home) was a set of Quills 3.5mm DPNs from Gill at Woolly Workshop which was the second thing I bought. The first thing I bought was this, which has photographed almost spectacularly badly; a skein of Fleece Artist Somoko - no idea what the colourway is (anyone who's bought this - is it always a one-skein-0f-a-kind yarn?), but it's much more autumn-leaves in dark woods than this somewhat... turdish... photo shows.

I have another skein of this, bought at The Naked Sheep in the Beaches in Toronto (appropriately enough) in May, which is in less neutral but (my spidey-colour-sense tells me) toning colours (the other skein's in the sock-yarn-bin in the attic) - so I'm thinking some sort of ripply long scarf. These days, I have to wear suits for work, and as my suits are, like the rest of my wardrobe, mainly black, making nice long scarves in atypical colours is fun...

I was then Good for a long while; until about 6pm, actually. Then I made my way among the leavings of the Serious Shoppers, and found this:

Yes, the name sold it to me as much as the colours

Haven't encountered this one before. In fact, the basic yarn has a real resemblance to the Blackberry Ridge yarn I bought for E-J's baby's shawl, baby now being newly 2 and having opinions of her own (the yarn's definitely a heavy laceweight, very slightly slubby in places. Not my usual colours, but I seem to be starting to branch out...) I'm likely to make one of these out of it.

[I'm also realising that at the time I bought the yarn for Baby M's shawl, Woolly Workshop was the only place I knew in the UK which had any sort of laceweight, and Gill hadn't then started carrying Zephyr as a plain lace yarn. How times have changed... it's stunning, really, both in terms of what's available and in terms of the knowledge of what's available.]

I'd been quite moderate, really, until then. But then right at the end of the day I saw these in a bucket under the table at Loop, which had been concealed by shoppers and queuers until then;

these are for a Jeanie and I was actively looking for 3 skeins of sock for that.... It seems to be my Misti Alpaca Year. The last skein I acquired passed through the hands of Laura Chau who was at the till on my visit to Lettuce Knit (she was apparently at I Knit Day too but I didn't spot her); the ones before that were bought in Montreal...

I'm not going to Ally Pally this year. Saturday was such fun, and I felt I was walking among friends every minute of the day. And nobody raised the classic Ally Pally Art-Versus-Craft Debate ONCE. Knitters knit (and of course, crocheters crochet). That's what we do. Some people, when you say "what are you making" will haul out the pattern; some people will say "well, it's basically [name of pattern] but I'm making it shorter"; some people will say "well, it's sort of [name of pattern] but I'm working it from the top down, making it scoop-necked, and I don't think I'll be doing the ribbing; I'll see how much yarn I've got left for the length of the sleeves; some will say "well, I think the pattern I made and charted myself is going to work in this laceweight" (diviknitty raise a hand); some will say "I'm making it up as I go along"; and some will simply say "I don't know yet" (caughtknitting is my personal fave in this category)...

And most knitting and crochet groups have everyone all together, stick-wielders and hookers, obsessionists and occasionalists, and nobody cares whether we're making art or craft.

The Art-Versus-Craft Debate always raises its head at Ally Pally, and just for once, I'm tired of fighting that battle, and even watching that battle being fought from the sidelines... Saturday was just about perfect (the bits which weren't are the responsibility of the train company and whoever you choose to blame for the weather); that'll do me.

Clarification... and some AP extras

Was listening to the podcast by Lixie earlier - not just because she said she was going to mention the blog and the shop, you understand, but that did get me listening to it when it came out this afternoon, rather than sometime in the following week as I usually do! I liked her comments on the Garnstudio/DROPS people particularly (they were absolutely besieged when I got there, and although I could see they had lovely stuff and the prices looked good, I just registered that and moved on, so a review was great... Have bookmarked their website not just for the free patterns...) but it was interesting to hear someone else's impressions of the same show on the same day, particularly when it's someone you've bought yarn with....

One clarification: a couple of people (including Lixie but she wasn't the first) have said there was a lot more stitching than knitting... And I realise that every time I go to Ally Pally, I'm comparing it with the first few times I went (I think the first time was 1996 or 1997, the year before I started City and Guilds Embroidery). As a new stitcher and inveterate knitter, I had genuinely thought that something called a Knitting and Stitching Show would have some, you know, knitting in it. I believe there were about FIVE, or possibly SEVEN suppliers that year - Colinette, the Wensleydale people (from whom I scored my first pair of Brittany needles and felt very guilty about spending £5.50 on a pair of needles), 21st Century Yarns (when they were still 20th Century Yarns; oh dear... I bought yarn, and also 125g of embroidery silk from them which I'm still using...), Black Sheep, and Uppingham Yarns. Shilasdair may also have been there, I'm not entirely sure. Elizabeth Gash was selling her beautiful knitwear and there were one or two places doing quite exciting machine-knitted garments. Texere were there, but catering exclusively to embroiderers. And there was the Handweavers' Studio (notably MIA this year), but as a strictly knit-from-the-pattern-and-shut-up sort of girl at that point, I was a bit intimidated by their off-piste-ness... At the time I was actually grateful for the lack of knitting, as well as fazed by it - the list of supplies needed for the C&G was so extensive and consisted mainly of non-fibre-related articles like sketchpads, paints, brushes and so on, that Art Van Go got most of my cash that year, with a sideline for Oliver Twists (sadly and incomprehensibly still without a website) and Stef Francis (someone in their wisdom put those two stands opposite each other this year! Your two major independent, long-established, family-run, British hand-dyers for embroiderers and you put them head to head? what on earth? Surely you need to give people time for creative justification and amnesia between stands?). OK, that's the folksingerish bit where I go on about the old times; but it's a kind of Show of Hands folksingerish thing where I can also acknowledge that the olden days had their entirely crap elements, and certainly the total absence of acknowledgement of knitting through most of the 1990s was one of those...

So I was just completely stunned by what was available this year. There was qiviut (once fondled, never forgotten! and you have to love a yarn which doesn't put a u after a q); there was yak (from a supplier who'd run out of cards...); there was a lovely bamboo/wool/cotton blend from Teo's handspun... I did miss Pavi Yarns, but I don't know whether I'm thinking about the Harrogate show, having been to that the last several years as well; they may never have done Ally Pally... The two suppliers which were completely new to me were Knit n Caboodle, who were very good fun to talk to (as described in previous post); and Socktopus. Both the people on the stand were talking on their mobiles while I was there, so I can't comment on their general friendliness otherwise, but they had several of the sock yarns you see regularly on Knitty or Ravelry. None of them felt quite as nice to me as the sock yarns I already had in my bag, so I passed, but took a card anyway for future reference...

The photo at the top of the post is completely gratuitous (except that it's the colour Lixie mentions on the podcast, see link above). Not only can I not blog what I'm knitting at the moment, but I've spent four hours on it today and have knitted up 8g of yarn. That's EIGHT GRAMMES, or a smidgeon under a quarter of an ounce... I'm a reasonably speedy knitter, and I've sat down, at a table, with a decent light and a good audiobook, and I've knitted up about half of the grammes in yarn that I've consumed in sugar in my tea while knitting, which, given the name of the pattern, is ironic. Anyone on Ravelry, you'll be able to guess easily which of the WIPs this is (I'm greensideknits over there, the blog name doesn't fit into their name criteria)...

I suppose the overwhelming thing about all these shows is that great reassurance that You Are Not Alone. For the first several years I went to them, I was a member of RCTN (rec.crafts.textiles.needlework, for the young) but most of the members there were from the US; it was so immensely reassuring to realise that there are All These People Here Who Do Stuff. And in the wake of the recent Yarnstorming, it still is...

I came, I saw, I spent; I offer a prize...

Ally Pally again! Most of the summer was spent in job-limbo, so it's amazing to realise that it's autumn again... This was forcibly brought home to me as I left the village before it was properly light this morning...





I have no idea what I did to make it look as if there's ectoplasm in this picture, but it's quite creepy, anyway. I had to leave this early because the rail maintenance people are Fiddling with the Track every weekend till the end of the year, and Ally Pally became a train, a bus, a train, another train and another bus each way...


Undeterred, I got there just after 9:30 and found to my delight that they were letting people in to the box office and the Palm Court; don't think I've ever been there before the doors opened before! Talked to a nice lady from Toronto in the queue - she was here on business but had decided to come all four days... Did my usual with the catalogue and ringed the suppliers I wanted to see. There were an amazing number of yarn places again - I thought this was the best selection yet although I know opinions have differed...


I bumped into several people on the way round, including Debbie, who used to teach pottery at Chesterton, and who I seem to bump into every year without fail despite us both varying our days, and despite our living only a few miles apart the rest of the time and never meeting... Also Emily, from the KTog group, at the very first stand... And more expectedly, Gill, who had Cheryl Potter with her on the Cherry Tree Hill stand; and an extremely elegant haircut...

At the Relax and Knit area, Yvonne had just been given a birthday present by Sue - the most gorgeous velvet bag with a hinge closure...




I meant to go back and say hi-and-goodbye, but ran out of energy after about four hours and made my way home! Having been the other side of the counter, exhibiting with Fibrefusion or volunteering on Relax and Knit, for the last few years, I'd forgotten how tiring shopping (which I generally avoid like the plague these days, unless there's yarn involved) and chatting, and things, actually are when there are so few places to sit down and take stock!

So - the damage...

As ever, the first stall I saw was Colinette, next to the doors to the corridor; this skein of Jitterbug whined to come home with me, so I let it. The colour is Slate, and it's actually quite a lot greyer and less lilac than this - while being a lot more attractive than the colour on the Colinette site... I think I'm probably going to turn it into these which appeared on Mim's blog last night...

There were some other delightfully squooshy yarns around, too; this, for instance, from the extremely nice lady at Touch Yarns - I was looking for yarn for Anne at the time and this hopped into the bag with it... It's 100% merino 4-ply, and I think it's probably not robust enough for socks; I'm thinking about a scarf or small shawl in a simple lace pattern (there's 455 yards)...

I went by RKM Wools - I see Rosie has some Lang Mille Colori on her blog so they must have had some somewhere, but I didn't spot it (although I only saw two of their stalls and they had three last year); I did, however, pick up this for the princely sum of £2.50 a ball. Silver Thaw, this is (colour 13)...

Surprisingly, this is the only really purple thing I got this year. I did fondle quite a lot of purply things, though.. And had a lovely conversation with the ladies at Knit n Caboodle about knitters and their involvement with the colour purple. They tried to entice me to buy purple needles, but I have a very similar set from Jan... They were great, though. And have purple carrier bags...

I picked up this DK sock yarn for the next Baby Surprise Jacket (they were also doing the pattern); and these, which may be useful once I start commuting with my sock projects! I saw something similar on the Yarn Harlot's blog last year but I think that one was metal... as I may have to put my bag through an X-Ray on the way into work in the morning, these reinforced cardboard ones look like a better idea... Once I've got something on DPNs I'll try them out and take photos...

There were also needles. Pretty, pretty needles. Lantern Moon needles... Rosewood Lantern Moon needles... Ickle baby 2mm, 5" Lantern Moon needles... This isn't the first time I've bought needles from LM, just the first time I've bought them for me... It'a a ridiculous sum for five cocktail sticks, but they're delightful... And will live in the little bag when not in use - I learned my lesson with the tiny Brittany ones...

And roving! I see all this pretty spinning on people's blogs done with pre-dyed roving... Fyberspates had some lovely stuff...

And so did these people from Finland - yes; it really is that bright... If it's too eye-watering, I have large quantities of plain Jacob fleece and some dark brown fleece to tone it down; but I have a feeling I'll be using it as is. Any hints and tips from the spinners are welcome...

And now to the prize.

My first post was about Ally Pally two years ago, and the blog's birthday is on Friday. I know there are people who read this and don't comment, and I'd love to know who you are; so as encouragement, leave me a comment about anything at all between now and the end of Friday (midnight BST), and I'll pull a name out of the hat - the winner gets a 100g skein of hand-dyed sock yarn (base yarn is undyed Trekking) in a colour of her/his choosing, either custom-dyed or a colourway from the shop.

Okay, here goes...

Inspired by the posts from Ally Pally, I'm dipping my toe into the ocean of blogging...

First: the Ally Pally stash -

Clockwise from the top; 6 balls of Elle Mexican Wave for a home-designed sweater; a ball of Schoeller and Stahl Fortissima Colori Socka; two of Limbo Color in the same colourway but DK; a ball of Louisa Harding Impression; and a Thing of Louisa Harding Sari Ribbon.

Ally Pally was fantastic; this is the 7th or 8th year I've been, and there so much more yarn there than previous years, and from all over the world. Special mention to the Alchemy people who were so friendly and enthusiastic at 9 in the morning while I was rambling round the traders' hall before it all opened.

A couple of other pictures of the stand I was stewarding (our embroidery group Fibrefusion).

Pauline, the group leader among the cards and samples; and a general view of the stand.















And this is my contribution; a mask based on Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence (fantasy for children/young adults); this all came out of a conversation in the spring with a friend who also read it as a child; put him off masks, and switched me on to them...

Tomorrow, photos of WIPs and I'll attempt to find out how all those clever things like links to other blogs work...