Knitterly

It strikes me that knitterly entered my vocabulary a while ago and hasn't quite left.  It's sort of shorthand for a particular type of courtesy and helping out.  There are more formal expressions of this - Random Acts of Kindness, for instance - but mainly, it's just something knitters do.   It doesn't always work - I'm not completely naïve - but mostly, in practice...

This evening I went to I Knit London for knit group, for the first time in ages (I go to book group, but that's on a different night).  I usually finish work later, and it's a popular venue, so getting a seat is a bit of a nightmare; but I was able to leave early this evening and knew at least two friends would be there.  And I had a good chat with one; but also with someone I don't know that well who was planning a fantastic rail journey around India. Biscuits (waffeln/speculoos to be precise) had been brought back from Lille/Dunkerque. Stitch markers were lent.  A Herman cake was shared.  I came home on the train smiling.

It goes internationally, too.  Very recently (this week has been... interesting... bear with me; I have no idea when this appeared through my letterbox) I took delivery of this...



This was a prize for a KAL, from the lovely Pacasha at Younger Yarns.   (When I first opened it I thought "oh, I must have been mistaken about the "fig" colourway; this is a brown yarn"...  I HATES winter; have I said that??? but here it is against a genuinely brown background under a daylight lamp, which is about as good as it gets chez Greenside this time of year)  Glorious.  This is going to be my Christmas present to myself...

I know that on some level, donating prizes does a business good.  I'm pretty sure this happens, because the sponsors of this particular KAL are sort of notable for their empty shops shortly after an update. However, for me, as a recipient, it's a lovely thing.  I've won a few things on this particular long-term KAL and they come with little cards, and herbal tea-bags, and messages, from actual people who dye yarn, and it's lovely... and before the sending there's also a conversation about colours, and personal circumstances, and the general business of just getting on with life.

Knitterly.

I Knit Weekender

I spent Friday and Saturday at the I Knit Weekender, and I had a marvellous time. After a stress-free journey down, so unlike last year, first up at the Royal Horticultural Halls was a presentation from Debbie New, author of Unexpected knitting. She was interesting and warm and funny, had some great slides of her projects and techniques, and was unfazed by questions being fired at her from the audience. Here she is knitting a complicated knot before the presentation started.

And here are some of the samples she brought. This little sweater was something I hadn't really noticed in the book, but was the most exquisite thing seen close up.

And one thing I'd not really taken account of was the amount of warm colour in her projects - you tend to think of techniques rather than colour, but the colour combinations were wonderful.

She'd also brought one of the "some assembly required" puzzle sweaters - you can see it as a long strip trailing off the first photo, and here it is after two keen volunteers from the audience had assembled it on the floor...

It was lovely to meet someone who's been a bit of a hero for a long time...

There were fashion shows - I only caught the very beginning of the Biggan show because I went to sit on the KCG stand for a bit of the afternoon.

Gill had some of my yarn on the stand - they do say everyone has her price...

And here's the full Woolly Workshop stand complete with Gill - fabulous colours, as ever. Mini Mochi seemed to be the best-seller but the Manos was hopping off the stand as well...

Opposite was Rockpool Candy with their Fibre Activism.

An overview of the beautiful halls. When I took this I didn't realise I had Jeni from Fyberspates in the shot - she's the tall blonde lady in the black.

The I Knit stand (and lots of knitters including Skein and Jill)

View from the top of the steps just before the fashion show.

Crocheted blankets on the Natural Dye Studio's stall - beautiful faded antique colours...

Herdy had all sorts of good ideas including the Herdybank and some lovely mugs.

And John Arbon/Coldharbour Mill had some fountains of beautiful fibres. Some of the 70% alpaca/30% merino at the back begged to come home with me so I let it.

After presentations, shopping and volunteering it was Wine O'Clock.

Jackier knitted faster than the camera could cope with

while roseanglaise, still justifiably chuffed by her recent honour from the Oil Pastel Society, found a novel use for a Harmony DPN.

After some dinner with Gill, I went back to Wigram House where I was staying for the princely sum of £28.50 plus booking fee - it's clean, quiet after midnight, incredibly central but in a residential street and very efficiently run. I'd certainly use it again - highly recommended.

On the Saturday morning I did a class with Alice Starmore. I'd signed up partly out of curiosity - she does have something of a reputation both for her expertise and for her business model - but mostly because if you're going to see your first steek cut, there probably isn't anyone better to do it! It was a wonderful class - the first half hour was some history (with an emphasis on the financial imperative having developed the highly efficient two-handed style of knitting, the left hand working Continental and the right working in English style), and a demonstration of all the basic techniques, with several samples, and the aforementioned steek-cutting (up the front of a v-neck cardigan). In the second half we embarked on a sample (on two DPNs, breaking the yarns off at the end of each row so we were always knitting from the front), while Alice came round each small group of people and commented/corrected as necessary. I was keen enough to finish the sample in the bar at St Pancras before catching my train home; and am going to do some more soon. And I got my new book signed!

As last year, the best part of the day was meeting up with people I knew and hadn't seen for ages. I didn't get pictures of littlelixie (apart from a sliver of her back on the final Debbie New photo!), who was on fine form in a lovely sequinned top until her back gave out again, or of daisydaisydaisy who was there on Sunday and shared a half-hour in the café with me. Or of several other people...

Sparkleduck was around, and some of her beautiful yarn was also on display at Woolly Workshop.

Here's Harvey, taking a well-deserved break towards the end of Friday

and from way too early on Sunday morning, the wonderful Woolly Wormhead - it was soooo good to see her again! And look, she's carrying two of her gorgeous Hats. She was teaching, but not till the afternoon...

From Cambridge, frizzyknits and her friend whose name I have forgotten again (I always want to steal their beautiful hair...)

And a very rare sight, Gerard, the force behind the whole enterprise, actually sitting down. I think this probably only happened for about 3 minutes. The whole organising crew was dashing around all over the place. Comments from last year had obviously been taken on board by the venue - the food lasted all day and the cashpoint had been filled up! As I left at about 4pm, AlpacaAddict came racing round the back of the building heading for the front - still working away... Thanks, guys; it was wonderful.

It was an altogether charmed weekend. I was so cheerful even trailing my three rather large bags through the village that I tried my "make-an-emo-smile" trick and it worked (if you grin unexpectedly at them they smile back , they can't help it, until they remember that everything's-just-wrong-and-life-isn't-fair and reassume their scowl. Bless their miserable little hearts...). And then I got home just as an SUV from Emmaus pulled up outside - one of the occupants got out and headed towards the shop. So I chanced my arm as everything was going so well, and talked to the driver, and he came in and got the folding bed I've been trying to get rid of for a while now and bunged it into the boot and drove away with it. Result.

I'll take pics of the shopping later on, for the next post...

London tourism, part 1

On Tuesday of the week I was on holiday, I went down to London for the day to be a tourist. I started off at Piccadilly Circus tube station...


and walked down Piccadilly, past Fortnums with its wonderfully strange lamps
to the Royal Academy of Arts which was looking very pretty in the sunlight.

On the way into the courtyard, a brief pilgrim stop at the society for the secular patron saint of classifiers.
Sir Joshua Reynolds appeared to be in fine fig, complete with garland...

I went to the J W Waterhouse exhibition, which was rather wonderful - 'mysterious females with ambiguous intentions', in the main (that was taken from one of the bits of blurb on the walls)... All but one or two of his most famous paintings were there, most of which I'd only seen in books. Lots of people doing textile-type things in the paintings - the Lady of Shalott with her tapestry, of course, but also Penelope with her loom - I love the way she's using her teeth, there... Circe poisoning the waters was a new one on me, as were many of the earlier history paintings. It was a reasonably sized exhibition, and there was enough to see without it being overpowering.

I headed south, via Jermyn Street where the traditional tailors seem still to be going strong

and down to Pall Mall heading for St James's Park; this is part of St James's Palace.

The view across the lake was, as ever, spectacular - although the pelicans were obviously a bit too hot to be bothered and were slumped on their rocks like untidy heaps of feather dusters.

This squirrel was eating pieces of sandwich people passed to him - he'd come over and take the stuff out of their hands...

And another piece of fauna from Lower Marsh, where I headed next - the cat belonging to what the butler wore squidged against the front window in the sun...

No explanation needed for why I might be in Lower Marsh...

And then it was lunchtime... More photos later when I get them cropped and uploaded...

Back to my knitting...

Oddly enough, I'd never heard the phrase "getting back to my/our/their knitting" before this current financial crisis. Then I heard it on David Reidy's wonderful Sticks and String podcast in one of the essays, used in one sense; and if I've heard one banker/building-society manager/finance expert use it in the sense of "retrenching to what we used to be good at", I've heard a dozen...

It seems to mean getting conservative again, going (cringe) "back to basics". And while I think that's a great idea in the banking sense, given the current general balls-up, I don't think that's what knitters mean. Certainly not the seven knitters gathered in the I Knit basement on a glorious sunny Saturday for Gwen's Weird Techniques class anyway. Being a bad, bad blogger, I had my camera but was both too busy and too timid to suggest taking photos. As it turned out, I was sitting next to Joy from The Knitting Goddess Yarns who also had a camera with her but I don't think she took photos either... I learned to knit and purl backwards; and that although I'd been doing the Magic Loop technique correctly, I still didn't enjoy it. And that I really, really need to practice the long-tail cast-on, despite my complete failure at it in the class, because there are some seriously fun things you can do with it... And cabling without a cable needle finally made sense - I'll try it on the second sleeve of St Brigid and see whether things go faster... It was a whirlwind of new techniques, tips, ideas, shared experience; totally recommended when it comes round again... And my first ever formal knitting class (as a student!)...

I have also been knitting. I made the Seachange sweater [Ravelry link] from Gerard's book Knits to Share and Care. It's a lovely thing to make and only took a couple of weeks of train journeys and knit nights... Here it is on the line:

And here it is on. Yes, strange photo. I don't have a full-length mirror at home, so I stand on a chair and take a picture in the living-room mirror...

It's the most sensuous thing to wear - incredibly soft wool and silk. It may pill - I think it's already started - but I really don't care because I feel fantastic wearing it...

The thing I really couldn't get was how the underarm gussets went in. Here they are from one side:

and from the other:

Because it's not knitted in the round, you have to sew up the sweater. If you're tempted to do this gansey (and it's a really nice, quick knit), here's a construction diagram for the underarm gussets. Click to embiggen in Flickr.

I'm including this because it took me forever to work this out. I think it's a spatial awareness thing, maybe; but I had to do it at I Knit where they had the model in the shop, and I only finally worked it out when Laura took the sweater off the tailor's dummy and laid it across my lap; thanks, Laura!

I've also finally fallen in thrall to those Mason-Dixon ladies and made a couple of ballband dishcloths. Here's the first one - the second one is in the wash at the moment... Cool, simple. quick and practical...

And now I know...

... why Mr Gaiman has always seemed so eerily familiar.
ETA: The second "conversation" in the comments bears reading... I can almost hear the tone of amused tolerance...

But back to I Knit tonight - I think they'll just bar me from there soon on the grounds that I have no home to go to and they're scared I'll be camping out on their one remaining sofa... Actually, I didn't intend to go this evening; but it was demolition and suggested reconstruction on a colleague's cardigan/hoodie time, and there was no time at work. Didn't get a lot of knitting done myself, but I did finish the last pair from the year's Socks That Rock yarn from the Rockin' Sock Club (looks like they're all signed up for next year...) on the train home. And they are lovely. They're in the Mediumweight, which is beautiful stuff.

Blogger is, however, unhappy with the idea of uploading photos. Or at least, this photo. So you'll just have to believe me that this is a nice pair of socks.

I'm intending to have a line-up of all the club socks for a post this weekend, at which point I'll hope Blogger is a bit happier...

Tomorrow night I'm hoping to get to the group at Ely (promiscuous with the knit, moi??)...

Knitting and books and brrrrr....

A great combination at I Knit tonight. I finished the book half an hour before the group started (in the pub down the road), and it was really good fun meeting people and discussing it, as it's been a bit of a favourite since I first read it as a teenager. Looks as if the group will continue meeting on first Tuesdays of the month, rather than the last Tuesday which mostly clashed with KTogs at the Blue, so I might get along to a lot more of the meetings...

I have been freezing the last couple of days. Thankfully not in the office - although the one with the other half of the team in it had no heating between the 29th and today - but outside it's been evilly, bitterly cold. Realised today that I needed a hat, badly; I have one, but couldn't find it at the right time this morning or yesterday morning... So I bought a couple of balls of Lang West (not an I Knit link because they don't have it in the online shop at the moment, but I'm sure they'd be able to send some if you rang/e-mailed them) which matched the tension on a pattern I downloaded from Ravelry (Ravelry link), and cast on at around 6:10 - and cast off two minutes before the train arrived at Waterbeach at 10:15 (with a couple of yards of the first ball to spare, total cost of hat £3.95). So had warm ears on the way home...

Which was just as well. As I was walking up the road, a guy started up his car and while he was scraping the windscreen, remarked that the thermometer was showing -7C... The London free papers had photos of the fountains at Trafalgar Square frozen over this morning... I know this is nothing to people who live in seriously cold climes (although apparently we're colder than some parts of Greenland at the moment), but it's pretty shocking to me!

First of the year...

Knitting event, that is. The view from the steps of Portcullis House was somewhat different this evening - County Hall was bathed in a series of different coloured lights. I'm not sure if that's just for the season, or whether it'll stay...



Going across Westminster Bridge, I got the chance to photograph the new lampstands which are pretty magnificent, and replace the standard modern ones. Slightly puzzling though - the hoardings we had to traipse past in single file last year said that the lighting was being replaced for reasons of safety at night (I assumed that was because there was a long distance between lamps, and they put in several more along each side) but they were only lighting every alternate one tonight...

It was a freezing night. I was originally intending to pick up some tickets from the National Theatre before going to the ultimate destination, the Royal Festival Hall foyer for I Knit's first knit-in of the year, but I got as far as the RFH and was seriously worried about the state of my fingers, despite my lovely crocheted mitts (thanks again, E-J, I think I'd have perished without them!)...

There were knitters...

Quite a lot of knitters... There was also a cameraperson from Reuters who interviewed Gerard and took film of people knitting... There was also a vast quantity of chocolate... A nice evening.

I didn't do the final Christmas-present knit much justice - I was going to do something arty on the South Bank with it, but it was just too damn cold... This is the Curvaceous scarf (Ravelry link), made in the yarn called for!!! by Yvonne, lounging on one of the RFH's surprisingly comfortable wooden chairs... Thanks, Yvonne!

I'll go back and add the link, but yesterday's Clanger came from here... Now I'm off to bed to try and read some more of The Moonstone for tomorrow night's Kniterati.

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.