Kashmir Shawl.

Every Month Jody gives the designers a theme to work to.

This month the theme was Garter stitch.

Most Shetland lace is knitted on a garter stitch base and there are so many pretty patterns to choose from.
The alternative inspiration was India and my mind wandered to an odd little stitch pattern that I remembered seeing that was based on a paisley teardrop.
Paisley shawls were very popular in 1800’s and were produced mainly in Paisley in Renfrewshire in Scotland. These were copies of Kashmir shawls from the 15th and 16th century that had started to find their way into Europe.

The Paisley shawls were woven, but as with many fiber crafts the motifs are interchangeable and found their way into a knitted form. I started thinking what would happen if I was to combine the colors associated with the Kashmir and Paisley Shawls with the lace motifs of classic Shetland lace knitting…
This shawl is the result.

The shawl is knitted in sections. A sideways knitted border, then the paisley section with a central section of rosebud lace. A second border section is then grafted or attached with a three needles bind off at the other end.

I had so much fun designing this one you can get it here (non Ravelry link)

In other news we are now well into the knitting of the Charlotte’s Web Mystery KAL and I am thoroughly enjoying knitting along with rest of the knitters, though I am slightly regretting my decision to do the cape version. It will be far more practical to wear for my lifestyle, but in the latter clues the rows are very long and with patterning on every row ( right and wrong side) I am really having to pay attention to all the purled decreases ;-). It will be worth it in the end.

Hopefully I will be able to show you all the baby clothes I have been making for colleagues soon. The last of them goes on maternity leave very soon and I can post without spoiling the surprise for the mums to be.

Al la prochaine!

So far I have added 5 of the Children’s Classic books KAL and a freebie.

From the top this is Watership Down ( Laceweight Faroese)

Moonfleet (Laceweight Stole)

The Once and Future King ( Laceweight Stole)

The Enchanted Wood ( fingering Weight Triangle)

The Secret Garden ( Fingering Weight Circular)

All of these designs plus many more are available on Ravelry and I will do my best to get as many as possible added over to Payhip for those that have issues with the “Nu Rav” interface.

If there are any particular designs that you want to be able to access sooner please feel free to email me or leave a message in the comments here and I will bump them up the list.

Finally, for your patience in reading this far, I have upload a free pattern – there will be more

Blowsey Ruffles – Payhip link

A fast, pretty scarf in Worsted wight that looks harder than it is. The perfect last minute gift.

Ravelry link

Currently on the needles a plethora of baby gifts for staff members that are having babies this term, plus I am trying to catch up on the test knit of Charlotte’s web, which is a bit late because the first Clue went out on Friday last and my other test knitters have already finished ages ago!

Photos of the baby gifts with details will be available once they have been gifted.

Next up will be designing the next KAL which is a secret for now

A la Prochaine

First off let me say that I am incredibly thankful for Ravelry, which I joined right at the beginning (April 2007). Without Rav I would not have hooked up with any of the people that I now have the privilege to call my online friends and I will be forever grateful to Cassidy for coding and including a Guernsey flag just for little ol me. Without Ravelry I would not have started designing or have been afforded the design opportunities that I have been over the years.

Now back in the day when there were only a few thousand of us and there was a waiting list because they couldn’t add too many people at once because the servers couldn’t stand the strain, requests like mine were easier to achieve. Now that the population of the site has topped 9 million – how is that even possible! – it is always going to be a case of you can’t please all of the people all of the time and I will be honest, at the start of the furore about nu-rav it was very easy to dismiss a lot of the noise as people not liking change (who does).

Working in IT for the day job I am well aware that most people do not like things to change and can get very vocal when their favourite software/website moves things around. BUT. After a while everyone finds the bits they moved and the noise dies down. BUT in this case it seems this is not the case, because in this case it appears that some of the changes (be they colours or changes to the code or whatever it is) are actually making it impossible for some users to use the site. There are reports of constant migraines and other ocular issues for a start and for whatever their reasons the Ravelry people seem unable or unwilling to address them.

Now let me say straight off the bat that I myself am experiencing no issues with any of the new Ravelry designs and actually love the dark mode (my inner goth is cheering here) and we must remember that Ravelry is a community site, is free and belongs to the creators and it is entirely their prerogative as to whether they address these issues/engage with the people affected etc etc. That is not what this post is about.

What this whole situation has brought into focus for me is best summed up by the Serenity prayer

I do not have it within my remit to wave a magic wand and fix this for the people affected, I hope by making this post that I am showing the courage to do what I can to help and as for wisdom, those who know me will know I don’t have a lot of that, but I like to think that I do have a lot of empathy ( some would say too much, but that is another post for another day).

It is going to take sometime because of the day job, but I have started the process of making all of my designs available via Payhip for all those people who are unable to access them on Ravelry. This is going to take a while – I was shocked to find that I have over 200 designs up there!

I am starting with my most bought/downloaded designs and will work my way down the list, which predictably for those who know me, has been put into a spreadsheet and annotated to within an inch of it’s life as to what should go up first and why.

So the first and as yet only design up is one of my first designs for The ladies from Unique Sheep, The Secret Garden Gradiance shawl. This was designed back in 2009 when they were first dipping their toes into a new way of dyeing yarn to gradually change the colours across a number of skeins of yarn – the original, to to my mind still the best, of the gradience yarns around. We set it up as a mystery KAL and it went on to become the first of many in our still going Classic Children’s book series.

If you are interested you can get it here. there will be others and if you have any particular requests please let me know so they can “jump the queue”.

Some will see this post as jumping on the band wagon and a new marketing opportunity. It isn’t. It has taken quite a bit of time and effort to get this all up and running that has yet to show any reward. To be honest I could have just kept my head below the parapet and continued just selling on Ravelry, who’s system is pretty effortless on my part.

I have done this because I believe in accessibility, not just to knitting patterns on the web, but also wheelchair ramps in public spaces, and accommodations for others with numerous other issues that impact on their ability to have a “normal” way of life.

Hopefully the Nu-Rav issues will eventually be fixed, it is heartbreaking to see people who have been on there for more than 10 years saying their goodbyes on the site as the classic skin was retired because they feel they cannot risk their health on the new look site. In the meantime I hope I have done my part, little though it is, to include those people in my own way.

Onwards!

A la prochaine!

Bear with me, this is not a knitting design post, but more of a documentation of a little project I have been working on for the last couple of days.

Some of you may have heard of a company called Darn Good Yarn, not only do they sell some lovely, ethical yarn, but they also sell skirts. These skirts are made in India and Nepal from recycled Sari material that would otherwise end up in landfill, by a workforce that are paid a fair wage and in many cases are women who live in vulnerable circumstances.

A year or so ago I purchase one of their lucky dip skirt packs and duly received 3 ankle length double layer garments. One I loved straight away, the two were a bit of a struggle. individually I loved all four layers, just not in the pairings as they were currently constructed. I constantly found myself putting them to the back of my wardrobe and eventually realised I was going to have to either pass them on or do something about it.

This was my problem. Olive greens and sand do not really gel with turquoise and lilac in my book and steely blues and purples together with sandy oranges and reds do not do each other justice. BUT if I was to separate them out and put the browns together and the blues/ turquoises together…..

I got the idea of a Frankenskirt from the Facebook group for Darn Good Yarns and once I really got thinking about it I couldn’t put it away.

So yesterday evening out came the stitch ripper and I chipped away at the waistbands of the skirts to separate everything out.

A couple of hours later I had a wonderful pile of slippery silky materials – gulp!

Problem no 1

Having separated them out, it quickly came clear that the layers I wanted to put together … were the same length so I was going to have to shorten one of each pair in order to maintain the layered look.

Easier said than done. I had read on the Facebook group that it was better to shorten a skirt from the top end rather than have to re hem what is a considerable diameter of skirt. Now this makes sense, HOWEVER.. These skirts are cut on the bias which means if you cut fabric from the top you are going to finish up with one layer considerably wider than the other (as I found out to my chagrin) when I tried to marry up the two . – Pi r squared and all that jazz.

So to get over that I ran a gathering thread through the wider layer and very gently gathered it to match the narrower long layer – I only had to ease in about 10 inches over a couple of metres, so it is not so much a gather as a redistribution of width. I then tacked the two layers together and then pinned and tacked the waistband back onto the blue/turquoise skirt. The sandy coloured skirt was another kettle of fish.

Problem no 2

The other waistband was blue to match the shorter layer of the original skirt and to be honest just wouldn’t do. Luckily I have a little bit of a fabric stash and I happened to have a small length of evening fabric with a similar weight and feel in a similar colour, that I was able to cut up to make a new waistband. So that also got duly pinned and tacked into position. Why pin AND tack? Well to be honest these fabrics are very light, floaty, very slippery and have a mind of their own. it may have taken me all night, but by the end of the day I had two skirts that just needed the waistbands re sewn, which I intended to do by machine to match the rest of the sewing on the garments.

Problem no 3

You would think that sewing the waistbands back on when tacked to within an inch of their lives would be simple. Umm no!

I managed to catch the underlying layer of the skirt into the waistband on more than one occasion causing much cursing and unpicking and re sewing. Thank goodness for the tacking, if the damned things had only been pinned they would have been in timeout by now.

Still these are the results

Skirt number one

This is the sandy layers , which were both the longer layers so this is still an ankle length skirt. The layers are different enough not to be matchy matchy, but similar enough that they don’t grate on my colour nerves

The we have the Turquoise/blue combo. This is now shorter, not that much, about mid calf length. Again not matchy matchy, but so much better – I love that turquoise layer – it looks so much better without olive green and sand poking out from underneath

Would I do it again – probably, but if I did I think I would shorten from the bottom. By the time I had cut, basted, gathered and pinned the top of the skirt I could easily have trimmed the bottom and re hemmed it, but we live and learn.

These skirts will now get much more wear and will feature in my work wardrobe.

As I said not a knitting design post, but kind of a knitting and kind of a design post anyway

Al La Prochaine!

First up, as promised photos of BIL’s Sweater.

This is the “Arty” shot taken draped across our Eucalyptus tree. It was a difficult thing to photograph, because it was so big and if you will excuse the description, shapeless. A big T shape is always hard to stage, unless it is on a person and I didn’t feel comfortable roping him in on an impromptu photo shoot – especially as we are still in lockdown, So I did the best I could and then wrapped it up and left it on our doorstep for him to collect when he kindly arrived with our groceries. Best of all it fits and he loves it!

This is the less artistic shot of it draped across the spa lid in an effort to show a bit more detail.

Faux rib throughout, side spits, standard T shape construction, knitted in pieces and then seamed. I know a lot of people like seamless, but when you are working on a 50 inch chest that is a lot of jumper to be hauling around in circles – especially when you are adding sleeves!

This pattern was calculated using The Sweater Wizard program that I bought years ago and find immensely useful for this kind of one off project. I hoard my copy carefully as it is no longer available. Such a shame as it is very simple to use and does exactly what you want it to do. You choose the shape, method of construction, the amount of ease, even the weight of the finished fabric, plug in the gauge and off it goes. Ah well! perhaps some computer whiz out there is working on a replacement…

Next up (I did say objects) pictures of the finished Goldilocks shawl.

Unblocked lace looks terrible

Blocking it is like a magical transformation – Tadaa!

Here some other versions by my wonderful test knitters Keith, Heike and Caroline

Every one of them a winner.

You can get more information about the pattern here. It will be available to the general public very soon.

We have already announced the next KAL. It will be Charlotte’s Web.

A lace weight octagonal shawl, with beads and Carolyn will be working her magic to also give a cape option for those that find circular shawls difficult to wear. We will be starting on this on May the 7th.

For anyone who might be interested in joining us, a link to the sign up page is here

I think that is everything for now, I have to cast on for Charlotte, and I have a jumper for my husband currently blocking, so there will be more things to show shortly.

A La Prochaine!

Because of the nature of my job I am in front of a computer all day I swear there is a sensor under my chair, because every time I get up, someone messages or calls me.

Still, bad weather and a lot of time indoors mean that I have been designing in the evenings and weekends. The next KAL after Goldilocks (which is currently on clue 7) is with the testers. I can’t tell you much more than that, because it hasn’t been announced yet.

I’m also working on some submissions, which I can’t tell you about yet – “So what can you tell us then?” I hear you cry.

Not much to look at it it?

This is a swatch – yes I do swatch. For a jumper that was promised to my BIL as his Christmas present. I knew he would want something plain but thought it best to give him some input as to colour, fit etc.

So hot off the needles and drying as we speak is a simple, drop shoulder round necked jumper in faux rib. I didn’t put a welt on the bottom, but started straight off with the faux rib pattern and sewed the side seams with a split on each hip. I swatched well and did all the measurements, so let’s hope it fits. I will publish photos once I have handed it over, it is only fair that he sees it first.

I might write this up as a pattern- we will see. I wouldn’t mind one myself!

Also on the needles a simple sock in sports weight. Curling Mists sock by Helen Stewart, first of the Curious Handmade KALs of this year.

Simple 2×2 cables, easy to pick up and put down while waiting for things to load on the PC. The yarn is a really pretty almost semi solid by The Unique Sheep. It has been in the stash for years and I have lost the ball band.

I also have help when working from home.

She can be pretty hard to type around, but at least she isn’t standing on the keyboard, which is her normal default position.

I leave you with a photo of our swim Saturday last. It was high tide, mid morning, weak winter sunshine and not a breath of wind – Heaven! A la Prochaine!

Not a week after it was reported on national media that Guernsey was the only place in Britain, not in lockdown, disaster struck and we have a cluster. The details are still hazy, but it is suspected that someone broke the self-isolation rules, either by going out or being visited by someone who didn’t social distance while there and lo we have over 100 cases and rising.

So, we are back in lockdown. Hopefully short and sharp, but I am guessing it will be at least a month. Still working from home has it’s perks I can make cookies in my coffee break and nice hot lunches instead of sandwiches, plus all that extra knitting time, when I would have been driving to and from work.

In the meantime, I have a new design coming out! The new Knotions edition is due out tomorrow and I have a shawl in it.

Marquee – a top down crescent shawl that was inspired by the stripy tents at a village fete I saw on TV.

Alternating bands of lace and stockinette, you can make this out of two skeins of yarn, or use it to make a scrappy shawl using up all those precious odds and ends that you have left over and don’t want to throw away.

Here is mine that was my test knit. You will see from the full sized photo that the shape makes it very easy to wear as it won’t fall off your shoulders.

It will be available tomorrow at www.knotions.com pop along and take a look!

A la Prochaine

I have still been designing I have also been beavering away at my day time job, which is one of the main reasons for the radio silence on blog. Being the Network manager rather than the underling takes up so much more time!

The other one was that I have been dealing with my father, who is in the early stages of Vascular Dementia. Lockdown was a nightmare. Due to my own health issues I was sheltering for 14 weeks so was unable to visit Dad, leaving all of the burden on my brother and his family, who were real troupers.

Dad is fine when he is in his routine, but as soon as it is disrupted he becomes agitated and confused, at the height of the problems he was being visited 4 times a day by carers and telephoning both Bro and I up to a dozen times a day. The final straw came with two A and E visits in 2 days and the wonderful medical staff on the island degreed that he was no longer fit to live alone at home. After a stay in hospital to build him up we were able to get him a place at a wonderful Dementia facility that is close to both of us – let’s be honest nowhere is far on this island . It is expensive, but worth every penny, because we know he is safe and well cared for and we can visit anytime.

For those of you currently under lockdown in this awful pandemic must be scratching your heads a little at my previous comments. I am fortunate enough to live on a small island of around 60,000 inhabitants. Our Director of Health happens to be a trained virologist. She very quickly advised our government put us into lockdown and put in strict measures at the borders which has meant that since July last year we have been living more or less normally within our little island bubble. We have no community seeding and we can’t go anywhere off island without doing at least 14 days quarantine on the way day in, but pubs cafes gym’s theatre’s etc are all open as normal.

So what have I been doing with all of my time while “stuck” on my little island?

I have been designing, so much designing! I have had several patterns out in Knotions

Budloe Night Mittens and Cowl

Sidi Bou Said Wrap

Ernouve Socks

And that was just for Knotions

we also did some more Mystery KALs, despite the pandemic

Narnia

and Arabian Nights

We are just starting our first KAL of 2021, something cuddly and cheerful – Goldilocks

I’ll show you more of that one as we progress.

I also managed to slip in a sock for the Scary Sock KAL – I have done at least one for every year that it has been going.

The Seventh Seal

I leave you with a photo taken yesterday at the Gentlemen’s Pool at La Valette. A group of Victorian bathing pools that are still in use today.

I was doing a spot of sewing on my new machine which came to a grinding halt, when I realised that I had accidentally sewn the two fronts and the two backs of a pair of trousers togther and was going to have to take a stitch ripper to them and unpick every single seam.

The answer was to step away and do something different for a while, so we drove down there for our second swim of the weekend. Sea Swimming in the middle of Winter is not for the faint hearted, but is so invigorating ;-). Air temp was 5 degrees and the sea is still hovering just above 10 degrees C.

Ok so not quite sea swimming, but it is ideal on a low tide. No scrambling over the rocks, but you still get to swim in fresh ( in more ways than one) sea water. The Castle in the background is Castle Cornet, built by King John in the 12 century to keep the French out after he lost Calais.

A la prochaine!

The new day job really is mad at the moment, but I have still managed to get quite a bit of designing done.

We have just released the final clue of Snow White, the current mystery KAL and so I can show you my finished test knit.

My test knitters as always were wonderful and here are theirs. Carolyn made a cape version and published the amendments so that others could follow suit. Heike made the middle one and Keith the right hand one.

While everyone else was busy testing Snow White I worked on a new shawl, designed to use up odds and ends left from other KALS,

Another Chance to Shine

This shawl is designed to use up odd bits of yarn with 100g skein of contrast yarn. In my case it was the leftovers from Snow White, with a couple of mini skeins from the stash and a contrast skein of speckled yarn kindly dyed up for me by the ladies at The Unique sheep to match my colourway.

We will be running a very informal KAL for this in a couple of weeks, so go check on the thread in the forums in Ravelry to find out what is going on. and to purchase the pattern.

Finally we will also be running a Mystery KAL for a garment – yes I know!

The Scalloway Vest MKAL will be running in May time this is a semi MKAL as everyone knows what they are knitting, that is will be Shetland lace motif (hence the name) and the shape and sizes available.

If you are interested in joining us go here to find out more.

Laura at the Unique Sheep has been busy creating sketches of all the different ways it could be styled. It is going to be such a versatile garment.

Anyways.. I think that is it for now stay tuned for more info as it arrives

Next up we will be announcing the next MKAL in the Classic Children’s books series.

al La Prochaine!

Long time no see (again). Do you make New Years resolutions? I try not to.

Instead I make suggestions to myself of things I would like to improve. I mean why put pressure on yourself!

I pay good money for this website and it’s hosting, so I really should visit it more often, I mean one post a month only means popping in 12 times a year so hardly an onerous task…

I will try to do better.

A quick catch up of what has done on since my last post in August.

I mentioned two sock designs for the Bleeping sock games. Both are now available to purchase

Prince of Persia -Sands of Time

and Pac-man (one for the retro gamers)

Both of these are now for sale at a sensible price (rather than the silly price that I always put up to discourage non participants from buying the design until after the games are finished)

Once the socks were done we were on to the next of the Mystery KAL’s

This time Rapunzel

This was the Summer KAL, We are just about to start the Winter one!

Next we will be tackling Snow White, which will be a circular fingering weight. Several knitters have found the last couple of shawls a bit big. It is really difficult, because I am given a set of yarn to design with and I hate waste, so try to use as much as possible so that people don’t think that they have wasted money on yarn they don’t get to use.

With that in mind I have tried to design this one with optional clues, so that it can be what ever size suits the knitter. This of course means that there may be left over yarn, BUT I have thought about that and I am working on a design that uses up leftover bits from previous KAL’s

So as I am fond of saying “watch this space!”

A la Prochaine