I’ve been a good knitter and managed to have a fully charged camera battery, sunshine, and more than 15 seconds of free time, so there are long overdue photos of the FO’s of the summer…
The rather delicious clapotis in Malabrigo silky merino. Love that yarn. Possibly a little too much. Especially as it’s going to be on the shelves of This Is Knit soon (more on that below!).
Next up is yet another Urchin
…followed sharply by another hat (what can I say, I’m a hat person), the Star crossed slouchy beret
which is ginormous and awesome all at once, in Sirdar eco wool.
I was caught in the grip of Moebius fever, following the incomparable Elizabeth Zimmerman’s instructions and making one from last year’s free Rowan international gift of 4 ply yumminess
…and a second in the freeeeaking amazing handspun I was gifted by the very gifted DudleySpinner when I was living in Belfast.
I still can’t believe it sat, unknitted, in my stash for so long. Ok, I can. I would clutch it to my bosom on a regular basis and talk nicely to it. Never would have imagined that simple garter stitch would be the best way to show off it’s fabulousness.
Yup. Fabulousness is a word. Honest, Guv.
Fabulousness is also a good word to describe my evening in town at the This Is Knit yarn tasting.
Got to drink yummy smoothies, squish yummy yarns and chat with some fabulous knitters. It always amazes me how knitting brings people together, and how amazingly welcoming and open knitters in general are.
Of course, I managed to walk out of the house without my business cards or my camera. I’m sure there will be lots of photos on the TIK blog in the upcoming days though.
For those of you that I couldn’t give a card to, here’s a link to MY ETSY STORE for you. All colourways are do-able in all bases, and I’ve currently got (or am able to get) lace, sock, dk and aran weights in organic merino, baby alpaca and BFL. If there’s something you’d like that you can’t see, just drop me an email or convo.
Just to show off a little, and to prove that I do actually knit up some of my own yarn on occasion, here’s one I prepared earlier…
Rather modified Fetchings in progress, in organic dk merino. So amazingly squishy I almost (almost!) can’t wait for that slight chill in the evenings that announce the arrival of Autumn.
Autumn is beginning to creep in faster by the day. While just a few weeks ago it was still bright at 11pm and there was never really true darkness, now the light has vanished by the time nine rolls around. While I love long summer nights, to paraphrase Grease, I love Autumn. I won’t start enthusing too much about the virtues of my favourite season yet, but I’m sure most yarnies are at least a little happy to break out their beautiful handmade jumpers and scarves and shawls at this time of year.
Emerging into the night air, the rain pelting down and the smell of delicious food from nearby restaurants in the air, I had a sneeky squish of some of the yarn samples I came away with. I think these two are my favourites
Lefty is Louisa Harding sari ribbon, which until now never really caught my attention. This particular colourway is really gorgeous though, with silver and chocolate brown and beautiful shades of blue. The tweedy cupcake is Noro, and is fantastic. I, like several knitters I spoke to this evening, have a love/hate relationship with Noro. The colours are fabulous, but on occasion colourways really do suffer from “surprise colour!” I really don’t want to spend €10 for a ball of yarn to discover, on knitting through to the centre, that it morphs into some clashing and entirely unexpected colour in the middle. There’s also the picking-bits-of-plant-matter-out-as-you-knit thing, but I can deal with that. To me, it’s just evidence that a plant was involved at some point, which is reassuring in a world taken over by man made fibres and materials.
This Noro stuff, the name of which I didn’t actually get other than it started with a “K” (some lovely reader might jog my memory) was a bit of a head turner. Lovely tweedy colours, squishy soft, and as far as I could see it was devoid of surprise centres. This one was soft brown and blue again, basically using the same colour palette as the sari ribbon, but in an entirely different way.
The evening reached a wonderful conclusion when I stepped in my front door and HusBeast stepped out…on his way to get us a rare take away for dinner. Major brownie points there. Perhaps time for more socks?
