Good morning all, especially to those of you who are here for the first time because you're following along with the 2017 Stylecraft Blog Tour. Welcome! Feel free to stay awhile, have a poke around, and make yourself at home. (You may even sit on The Chair.) And yes, this post will include both a brand new free pattern, and the chance to win oodles of yarn, regardless of where in the world you call home. GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED. So. Very, very, late last night, the Stylecraft Blog Tour Bus pulled Continue Reading
Weekending. With Yarn.
The other weekend, the 'Stylecraft Blogstars' headed to West Yorkshire for our twice-yearly gathering of woolly minds. Imagine an entire weekend spent with kindred creative souls, where people will look at you funny if you don't chatter on (and on) about knitting and crochet. Imagine a get-together where it's practically de rigueur to cast on at the breakfast table. Imagine a weekend where nobody would dream of interrupting you whilst you're counting. Imagine getting a glimpse into the Continue Reading
Stylecraft Blogstars Meetup, aka Not Too Shabby A Weekend
It's much easier to write blog posts when things are going wrong, or when nothing much has happened. Comic anecdotes come more readily when you've mistakenly put your husband out for collection with the recycling, or when you've spent an insomniac half-night pondering a mysterious chicken-shaped splodge on the bedroom ceiling. Unfortunately,* things have gone catastrophically well this weekend... which was immensely fun to experience, but isn't very funny to describe. I have lovely Continue Reading
‘Head Over Heels’ Sock Yarn Review
See these? These are happy feet. If it weren't for the fact that they're pointing skywards, then they'd probably be dancing. Badly. So be glad that they're safely away from the ground. The reason for their joy is no doubt obvious. It involves some splendidly colourful new sock yarn. You may have heard already, but a few months ago, Stylecraft launched a range of 4-ply sock yarn called Head Over Heels. It's 75% superwash wool and 25% nylon, and it comes in six different marvellously Continue Reading
All Aboard The Stylecraft Blog Tour Bus For A Giveaway And A Free Pattern!
Have you been following this year’s Stylecraft Blog Tour? Yesterday, designer/author Sue Pinner showed us her marvellous Spinning Top crochet blanket pattern. Six new shades have been added to the aran and the chunky Stylecraft Special acrylic ranges, and the fine fibrous folk at Stylecraft have mixed these up with some of the existing shades to make a couple of different ten-ball colour packs that they'll be selling for a while. Over the summer, they kindly gave a few of us yarniacs a pack to Continue Reading
Giveaway? Giveaway!
Shall we have a giveaway? Wa-hey, let's have a giveaway! Start sharpening those typing fingers in order to enter, because details are coming later in this post. This is the third and final part of my triptych* of posts about the exciting Yorkshire/Stylecraft/Blogstars shenanigans. (Previous parts: the mill tour, and the first evening.) But it's very hard to produce an even mildly amusing post when absolutely nothing about the experience was catastrophically disastrous or weird. The closest I Continue Reading
Blogstars
Last weekend I was in West Yorkshire at the invitation of Stylecraft. The occasion was the inaugural meeting of their 'Blogstars' programme, in which a dozen of us yarny bloggers/designers get the chance to work closely with Stylecraft and hear whispers about new yarns that are on their way. (Clue: there are some very interesting and unexpected developments afoot.) They kindly asked me to take part. 'Would you like to come up to the picturesque valleys of West Yorkshire, tour our old woollen Continue Reading