Saturday 27 June 2015

Ten Poems About Knitting

A poetry book about knitting! Who'd have thought it?? Fab little collection anyway of poems old and new, sad and happy, long and short...you get the idea.

Friday 19 June 2015

Patricia Roberts

You know a knitwear designer's famous when you ask your Significant Other if they remember you having a knitting pattern book by Patricia Roberts back in the eighties, and they say yes. But that's what happened this morning and then I went off to find the book and I can't. Oh no! Of all the many fantastic knitwear books I've bought over the years, why did it have to be that particular very fantastic one that went missing? Did I look at it one day and think: these are all very eighties - time to let go? Did I lend it to someone? Did I never unpack it after we moved in twenty five years ago?

Well, I'll have a better look later, but in the meantime someone very kind has uploaded all the Patricia Roberts patterns to ravelry. Not the instructions, just the photos and signposts to where they can be found (mostly in books in secondhand bookshops, I think). Very well worth a scroll through for a taste of the more exciting end of eighties woolly fashion. I wasn't as adept or cavalier about yarn substitution at the time and some of the designs would've required PR's own yarn but I did make probably the most conservative garment featured - Some Like It Hot.

Saturday 13 June 2015

Just lately I've mostly been...

...making and re-purposing squares.
The knitted ones are for the Nepal blankets that we're making out of donated yarn. I'm not a fan of garter stitch, but if I switch to the much faster stocking stitch they'll be a different size and shape so I'm sticking with it. Each one takes me 2 hours, which seems like a long time to knit a plain square. Then I realised that a while ago I'd taken apart an old afghan, that I crocheted in the 70s, and rescued the squares that the rabbit hadn't wrecked with her teeth and claws. They were all washed and ready for edging, which I was working my way through slowly, slowly, very very slowly, as the advert doesn't say. Anyway, however slow it might be to edge them and sew back together it's going to be much faster than knitting garter stitch squares, so at the moment I'm doing both. (Plus a child's bolero, plus a toggled neckwarmer, plus my never ending vintage jumper, plus...you know how it is.)