(YES, THE SIGNED ARNE AND CARLOS GIVEAWAY IS COMING, NEXT POST!) Right now, my grin would make even the Cheshire cat look surly. I've finished the ****ing, ********ing, ******************************ing knitted mandala picture! Wa-hey! You know what? I gave up on the gold embroidery, because although it was lovely and glittery close-up, it just looked messy when viewed from across the room. So I unpicked it. But that meant that I'd, er, finished the mandala. At last. It's come a long Continue Reading
Blocking Your Knitting
Right. Before we begin, I just wanted to say that the (signed) Arne and Carlos giveaway is coming soon! As is a post about some rather gorgeously talented fellow bloggers and their amazing work. Meanwhile... Progress on the knitted mandala picture continues at a pace so slow that I was recently overtaken by a glacier whilst knitting. Having cut the steek to transform the mandala from a knitted-in-the-round tube to a flat piece, I decided to wash and block it, in order to enhance its Continue Reading
Tutorial: How To Steek
Steeking (aka setting your knitting up to be cut, in order to turn a knitted-in-the-round piece into a flat piece, for example to open up the front of a cardigan) tends to scare otherwise bold and courageous people. It feels vaguely wrong to take a pair of scissors to your knitting.Really, it shouldn't. Honestly. It used to scare me, until I tried it a few times, at which point I thought, "Is that all?" The secret is this: *whispers* Knitting doesn't especially mind being cut vertically. (Cut Continue Reading
Watchin’ The Swatchin’
Yay! The swatch-of-randomness for the knitted mandala picture survived its experimental wash-and-block! (Bet you've been on the edge of your seats about that one. ;-) ) So. It IS possible to wash-and-block a mixture of rich, inky Fyberspates green, with an innocent little Wendy 5-ply cream. Looooooooook! Admittedly, the washing was brief and minimal and in cold water, with a Dylon 'colour-catcher' as a precaution. But there didn't seem to be any dye on the colour-catcher at the end, so Continue Reading
Knitted mandala in progress
Hello, yarn-loving friends. The biggest joy of blogging is to be amongst like-minded knitting and crocheting souls. You're all lovely. :-) The knitted picture of a mandala is coming along surprisingly fast. Twenty thousand stitches down, about forty thousand to go. Want to see? This photo doesn't do it justice. The blighter is knitted in the round, so you're only seeing just under half its width, here. And I've only done the bottom portion, so it's going to get a LOT bigger. So, what you're Continue Reading
New Project This Way
A new and rather striking housey project is on its way. I'm very excited about this one. More designing of stranded motifs: happy days. Here's a quick and sneaky glance at a preliminary sketch of part of it. You'll be the first to know when it hits the needles. Meanwhile, we all trooped over to Hay-On-Wye the other week, for the literary festival. It's a happy pilgrimage that we make most years. For those who've never had the pleasure, Hay is a hilly, sheepy, rainy Welsh town of 1900 Continue Reading
Designing Stranded Motifs… Is Actually Rather Easy
The only difficult things in knitting are the techniques you haven't tried yet. When I was a beginner, I looked at all that beautiful knitted colourwork out there - fairisle, especially - and I thought, 'Well obviously, I could never do that'. And so I couldn't, right up to the moment when I picked up my needles and tried. Because let's face it, less competent people than us have produced truly beautiful work. And once I'd mastered stranded work (of which fairisle is an example), I got Continue Reading
A restless post of several little bits
Since the ridiculous, monstrous, ludicrous, in-what-crazy-state-of-inebriation-did-I-conceive-this-idea stained glass window afghan was finished, and also since the large crochet hippo settled in to life here in the old brewery, I've been picking at various projects in a desultory way. There's a jumper* in the background that gets a bit of attention late at night. There's yarn-bombing the outside of the house, very much a work in progress over the breakfast table. (Trust me, there will be photos Continue Reading
Knitting: it’s everywhere, this Christmas
A while ago, I blogged about knitted motifs being trendy at the moment, especially fairisle designs. To a fairisle addict like me, this both gladdens my heart (the world is coming round to my way of thinking at last - I wonder what took it so long?!) and worries me ('tis written in the rules that Whatsoever Is Trendy Today Will Be Deeply, Shamefully, Untrendy Tomorrow, and I say that as someone who proudly wore fluorescent orange fluffy socks for all six weeks that they were cool in the 1980s Continue Reading
Fern cushion for bench finished
I know, I've mentioned this a few times, but it is - at last - done! Completely done! I've sewn the two sides together around a custom-cut foam cushion, then sewn some white cord all the way around the join to make it neater. So... we have the green side (a couple of greenish shades of Rowan Fine Tweed roughly alternating):- And we have the red/brown side, also comprising a few shades of Rowan Fine Tweed thrown together. This side is supposed to coordinate with the curtains, but I Continue Reading