I'm always looking at things these days to try garner ideas to design my own things inbetween knitting things for other people. Things for other people mostly follow a set pattern so it's nice to be able to go with the flow on my own designs The question is where to get the flow from.

Last week I found this book in a charity shop.

Kaffe Fassett book

I've long wondered what the fascination is with Kaffe Fassett, and for 50p I think I'm beginning to find out. I was rather struck by these

The item on the left reminds me of an Escher drawing. I just love her hair too!

The one on the right struck me here.

Both of these appealed to me.

What strikes me about these patterns is just how different they are from the traditional one or two colour patterns you generally see, and how he mixes the colours together. I wonder what my brain will produce from this.

I've been looking around at where else I can gain inspiration and it occurred to me that joining a Guild may be a useful thing to do. There are three potential candidates.

The Guild of Machine Knitters - £15 for a year
The Knitting and Crochet Guild - £18 for a year
The Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers - £20.50 for a year. They don't have a branch in my area, but the online branch looks very interesting indeed.

I might try out one a year for the next three years and see which one turns out to be the most useful.

Always start with a good title, that's one of the few things I can remember from my lessons at school.

So I'm still busy here, trying to complete something as fast as I can as I know this is going to be used in something else.

Thunderbird 1

Thunderbird 3

I've knitted these in the Intarsia style which involves throwing lots of bobbins and cones and balls of wool about. Now having made them I realise it's too slow and will try a different approach in future.

The pictures themselves are mainly recycled wools, that's recycled as in I found them in charity shops kind of recycled. The red and black I had to buy brand new though, they seem to be far too popular to find in charity shops.

Well, when I first condemned these oven gloves nearly a year ago, i did a swap with a friend for some new ones. If I'd have thought about it some more I could have saved us both some work so this is how I've restored them.

The beginning, with holes worn through at the point where the fingers are placed for lifting pots and hot dishes.

First, take apart your gloves by unpicking the binding all the way round.

Next, patch your holes. I used old bits of denim.

Then reassemble the oven gloves, but this time, put the parts that cover the back of your hands on the opposite side, this turns what used to be the inside of the glove onto the outside and vice versa. The denim patches are now hidden away. Reattach the binding, moving it round slightly so that a new piece is at the end instead of the worn piece.

The finished article.

I made this dishcloth last week.

It's the Giddy-up cloth from Frogiez place, I found it through Knitting Pattern Central, one of my favourite knitting pattern places.

Having started in this vein I decided it would be nice to knit a few really smart ones in the same pattern.

This is my collection of Rowan 4-ply soft, 100% merino wool, donated of course! So it's nice to recycle it into something useful.

Jacket back

Jacket front

Phew! I'm exhausted.

You can never be too organised as a knitter.

I've always been fascinated by the idea that you can transform one thing into another thing. Plasticine held my attention for many years as a child, but now I've moved on.

These are my raw ingredients. Ex t-shirts and sweatshirts, cut into strips. When I cut them up I didn't really think it through, so they are all quite short strips that I am sewing together, in future I shall cut them into one thin continuous strip so that I can knit them up by machine instead of the slower version by hand.

This is what the ball of yellow in the top picture turned into. It's knitted on size '0' needles so it knits really fast. Yes, I really did knit that in two days, some things just NEED to be knitted.

This will be added to pieces like the one below to make a full rug.

On the right of the above picture is a raw ingredient for my next skill to learn - spinning. This is carded Jacob's fleece, sent to me by a friend. Wikipedia tells me that

The wool of the Jacob sheep varies with the animal in question. In general, Jacobs have open fleeces weighing no more than about five pounds and of medium-fine quality. The Jacob is considered a down breed and the fleece feels somewhat springy.

It is indeed somewhat springy.

So this is my first go at spinning and as you can see, I appear to have made some sort of novelty yarn. Thankfully, I received the book at the bottom of the picture a couple of days ago and things have now rapidly improved.

Our regular programming is back!!!

As modelled by himself! this is cashmere/cotton sent to me in a yarn swap. I have no idea if it makes good socks so it's an experiment really.

My knitting and sewing workspace. It's taken me about six years and various house renovations to be able to get to this, but I'm glad I did. I'm very proud of this and it means that I can leave work out and undisturbed when I need to.

That's if I can get to sit down.

I recently had a get-together with some friends.

This is one of the dishcloths I made, with the words "Love to knit with my friends" on it. It doesn't come up clearly in the picture. We talked, drank tea, ate cake and swapped useful stuff.

This is the aftermath of our afternoons meet up.

Finally finished today, my grans birthday present, in pink French cotton.

It's a set of circular knitting needles of varying lengths. Just what I needed.

A tea cosy made in the colours of my cycling club, Cleveland Wheelers, in the team colours of blue, red and yellow.

This is the back of the cotton top, after the second try. I forgot to include the shoulder shaping on the first attempt. I think my enthusiasm got in the way.

I've got so much to finish right now this minute so I can get on with other things that I've hardly had time to think never mind type.

The everlasting jumper still needs yarn for the sleeves, which it almost got last Friday but the colour match wasn't good enough. New supplies should be with me shortly. Let's hope so.

The cotton top has gained a complete front and I am halfway up the back. Despite the way it looks the pattern repeats are quite easy to remember, although the holes across the middle are very easy to knit straight past.

The aran cycling jacket is also well underway.

This is the side piece, I have knitted the second one since. I discovered a neat trick when I knitted the pocket.

As the pocket is knitted in with the front it tends to flap about as you knit. Safety pins are a useful way of securing the work, and you don't have that dreaded 'lost pin' moment that you get when you use ordinary sewing pins in knitting.

Finished gloves.

Sometimes knitting seems to drag on forever, and then suddenly zip! pow! It's finished. That's pretty much how these gloves went. They are a repaired set, they took a long time, and I'm sure that there are folks thinking 'It would have been easier to buy some more'. Well, it depends how you define easier I suppose, and from my efforts here I've worked out a sure-fire way to make some new gloves that fit perfectly first time. You'll have to wait and see how I do that, there's plenty more on the go here, but at least I've knocked one item from the list.

Or rather it's THE back.

This is the finished back for my Aran cycling jacket. I think it looks better in the picture than in real life, the sunshine really brings out the cabling. It's knitted up quite fast as you might expect with this thickness of wool. The Chamonix I am using is ideal for this kind of work even though I suspect it wasn't actually designed for it.

So, it's on to the front then.

So I found these at my local charity shop on Saturday.

Knitting books.

The one on the left is a set of punchcard designs by Wendy Phillips. Over the past few months I've picked up quite a few of these thin booklets with her designs in, and yet I know virtually nothing about her. I've never seen anything in any of the magazines I've picked up and yet she seems to have been extremely prolific in designing for all manner of things, fruit, animals, Christmas, you name it and she's probably designed a punchcard for it. I'd be very interested to find out just how many designs she has put together and if they are still available.

In other news, it's thumbs up for the glove repair.

Thumb on glove.

And the jacket keeps on growing.

The glove.

The cotton top

The Aran jacket.

Any perceived future crisis is likely to be very boring. Bring your knitting.

Acrylic yarn from Yeoman Yarns.

It's arrived! More reinforcements in my quest to knit, knit and knit again. Thrice knit I say! (I think thrice should be employed more often, what a great word)

So I was thinking, as it's acrylic yarn should I have even thought about buying it. I got it to use with some acrylics that I already have and mainly aquired through a local charity shop. If I knit things in a mix of wool and acrylic they probably won't look right, the tension will be all odd and the washing instructions? Let's not go there. The effort and energy used to produce acrylics is tremendous and I'll readily admit to having a preference for supporting the use of real wools particularly the ones now coming from rare breeds.

I think this is an item for my 'working towards' list. As I use up the acrylics I do have perhaps I can replace them with more sustainable and local to me versions. I'm sure that they're out there, so I'll keep looking.

All suggestions welcome.

Start of cotton top.

I love beginnings. A new hank of yarn, a fresh piece of paper, when I was at school a brand new exercise book, these days I love a brand new, never borowed before library book. There's nothing quite like being at the very start of something. The inifinite possibilities, the choices about what to do and which way to go.

So I got going, this is one complete pattern repeat. It doesn't quite match the perfect example in the magazine picture but I would imagine that version has been washed, pressed and blocked to within a picometre of it's existence.

Today's weather forecast is awful - so more knitting time for me then - Great!!
Oh, the sacrifice! The hardship!!

Pink French cotton from Yeoman Yarns.
It's arrived and it's not a glove. Hurrah!!

It's the Pink cotton for my gran's birthday present. I had to knit three tension squares before I started to get anywhere near the right amount of stitches to knit. I see why they are called tension squares, I was beginning to feel very tense. After the third attempt I finally cracked it and cast on. I'm now on the eighth row of the first repeat, and strangely the pattern gets you to knit the front first. I don't think I've ever met that before. Hey ho, knitting is all about being flexible, so front first it is.

The second re-knit glove in progress. Knitting it is, exciting it isn't. Sometimes knitting just is that way.

There are a million variations on the theme above. I may just get through half of them in the coming weeks. How so? I have hit the knitters eternal dread. Knitting doldrums. I have a list of things to knit that's as long as my arm (evidence on request), but almost every project is stuck. I'm either waiting for yarn or some other necessary equipment to arrive through the post, or I need to learn something on my knitting machine first. The second problem I can actively sort out, but it's frustrating waiting for the first one to happen. You probably don't want to be my postie right now.

So does this mean I have bought yarn instead of recycling it? Well, in two out of three cases, yes it does. In fact, in all three cases where I am waiting for yarn it's brand new. One lot is free - although that makes it absolutely no more environmentally friendly. The good things about ordering new yarn are that I help support other small businesses in the same field. It's an awkward square to circle. Do you buy new and create more resource use or do you recycle because it's friendlier to the planet? If you constantly don't buy the firm you need may go out of business and that helps no-one when they are a small friendly firm with an excellent ethical policy. Two of my upcoming projects use a combination of new and recycled yarn, which is a good way to go I think.

My friend asked me to knit her a cardigan to wear at a summer wedding - the weather in the UK being notoriously fickle on a good day.

This is the finished item. It was so much fun to design and make. There was no pattern for anything like this that I could find so we just drew a sketch and went from there, most of it is a simple case of maths.

What really strikes me about it though is the invisible part. The trust my friend showed in my capabilities as a knitter even though she can knit herself. She allowed me time to work and make mistakes, she even liked one mistake so much we kept it and it's now a major feature of the finished item.

Before I knitted this I'm not sure I was really convinced about my own abilities, but my friend obviously saw something in me that I didn't see. Now though, my confidence is sky-high, I'm garning knitting projects from all over and I just know that I can complete them and that people will love them. Without this first one though I would have been lost.

Having got a little sick of K2, P2 yesterday I decided to cheer myself up and cast on for the next thing. As I'm not actually knitting anything for myself at the moment I decided on the Chamonix and this pattern rather than my original choice.

It's an Aran jacket with a hood, which I hope will work with my cycle helmet.

So I cast on.

What'd you know? Same stuff, different day.

In other news

I started the second glove in need of repair.

As it's my birthday, anyone for cake?

My gran has knitted since she was 14, mainly for herself I imagine, but when I was younger she was forever knitting something for someone. She knitted me so many things, and thinking about it now I don't think I own any of them anymore and I'm certain I took it for granted at the time. My gran is now more advanced in her years and doesn't always feel like knitting. She's certainly earned a rest. So when this pattern appeared in a magazine she reads a few weeks ago and she mentioned how much it appealed to her, well I couldn't resist and so I offered to make it.

It's a cotton top, in pink, which is nearly up there with beige in my palette of hated colours, but offerers can't be choosers and as I don't have to wear it that's fine. Does one garment repay a lifetime of knitting? Well, it's a start.

I got the back and forth,
end to end,
knit two, purl two blues

Knitting is a thing to live for. It's exciting, it's interesting, it's fun, it's an education and a history lesson. Sometimes though, it just sucks. Collars don't do anything for me. They leave me cold. Where's the excitement? Where's the interest? Where's the cute twist in the middle to relieve the monotany of boredom? I knitted this last night whilst watching 'Snoopy come home' which turned out to be only marginally more interesting than the knitting. There's another half a ball of wool to go. I may have to cast on something else before the end of the day to stop myself going insane.

Spot the obvious. There's no sleeves and I'm working on the neck. Yep, I finished the back, and the front, and now I'm on the last ball of wool. Fortunately I have been promised some more so sleeves are a distinct possibility, although by when is an entirely different question.

I'm still here. I've been busy. All will be revealed as we go along. Today though we talk about gloves. What do you do when your gloves have seen better days? When perhaps they have seen one winter and one cycling accident too many?

Well, if you are smart enough to live with someone who buys Peter Storm thermal gloves with knitted exteriors you obviously reknit the exterior.

The left is a before, showing my previous and rather useless attempt at patching. Having realised the gloves were in two secions I was able to cut the exterior off and reknit using sock wool with the thermal layer as a template ala the right. The fingers get a bit tricky, and you need to start quite low as my effort suggests but I think the overall idea has merit. Oh, and if you use stuff out of your stash it doesn't cost anything - my favourite price!

I cast off.

This is a knitted version of Piet Mondrian's Square Composition, taken from a chart in Knitting Masterpieces.

I was reading Mason-Dixon earlier this week. Kay has been talking about art and paintings.

But here I am. A knitter in love with paintings. I can't think of anything else to do but knit them.

You see, that's the whole point isn't it. This is knitting, you can knit anything you want to, and the reason I love the folks at Mason-Dixon is because they talk about their inspirations and there are no knitting police who tell you that you're holding your pins wrong and your stitches are wobbly (Ahem, sorry, I appear to have gone off the point).

So, to the art. I'm not really one for art galleries, but I do love a good album sleeve - I am old enough to remember vinyl records, so artwork was LARGE. This is my idea of a good album sleeve.

It's simple it's effective, it's Barney Bubbles. I love Barney Bubbles album covers.

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