Welcome to dayΒ five of the Stylecraft Blog Tour! Fancy a free pattern and a chance to win a whole caboodle of yarn, regardless of where in the world you are? Read on, Macduff... So, just for the benefit of anyone who is new round these 'ere parts, (hello at the back, there), a few months ago I co-judged Stylecraft yarn's competition to find a new shade for their range of Special DK. With me were the editor of Let's Knit magazine (who waited very patiently in the car park before we went in, Continue Reading
Crochet Crocodile Stitch Photo Tutorial
One of the crochet stitches that's important for the house bag is the crocodile stitch. Look, here it is, used for the roof of the house, which forms the flap for the bag:- It's not difficult but it looks fancy, and it's a stitch that works well for scarves. Since you work the scales one-at-a-time, it can carry a variegated yarn quite well, more so than - say - a granny square, which can get weirdly splodgy in a variegated yarn. Just don't make an entire cardigan in this stitch, 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
How to crochet leaves
Meanwhile here at the brewery, it's raining. So that means no fancy brewery-housey yarn-bombing big-reveal photos quite yet, because dreary grey drizzly rainy background just wouldn't do them justice. But that's no bad thing, because being congenitally over-ambitious, I've had further ideas for embellishment since my last post. Who knows where this'll end? Somewhere ridiculous, that's where. Somewhere that'll result in me being drummed out of the parish by a committee of more 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