The Weeping Window. . .

These are some of the many ceramic poppies outside of St. George's Hall in Liverpool.  These made up part of the huge installation outside the Tower of London last year.

This piece is called The Weeping Window by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper.  St. George's Hall is where the recruitment of soldiers took place during the First World War.

Outside the hall is the Liverpool Cenotaph, one of the finest war memorials I've ever seen, sculpted by Herbert Tyson Smith and finished in 1930.  On one side you have all the soldiers going off to war.

And on the other, the grieving families placing wreaths in remembrance.

 The contemporary detail is beautiful and striking.

Dave is Done. . .

Hooray, my first ever pair of full socks completed!  The pattern is Dave from Rachel Coopey's Coop Knits Socks, Vol 2.

I used a skein of 4ply sock yarn from the Knitting Goddess that I bought some a year or so ago.  The colourway is called Love Lies Bleeding, and I have to say it did bleed a bit in the washing machine, so the blood red has become a bit more pink.  The yarn feels lovely on the feet though.

I did make a few mistakes here and there, and the heel is a bit knobbly, but I'll wear them a lot and see how long they last before becoming a committed sock knitter.  It is a nice portable project to have in one's bag and I'll have to dig out my Latvian sock kit again, now that I've grasped the basic construction techniques. So there probably will be more socks in my future.

Gwlana 2015 Part Two: Wanting to Turn the World Blue. . .

It was extremely grey and damp yesterday and my thoughts turned towards blue skies, cocooning and crafting, so it was a good time to reflect on some of the ideas/projects that came out of my recent Gwlana retreat.

I was so excited about all the different techniques and so eager to try them all, that I went a little crazy (read clumsy and haphazard) with my tea towel and napkins, instead of methodically trying to work out a proper pattern. The end result was that taken as a whole, each dyed piece of fabric didn't look that great, but there were little patches where I quite like the final result. These lines for example, were formed by wrapping the tea towel around a pole and then tying it tightly with cotton string.

What did turn out well were my individual solid charm squares in various shades of blue and beige.  So at about 10pm on the Saturday night as I laid everything out on the bed, I was inspired to start madly cutting up the best bits of my tea towel and napkins into squares to add to my dyed ones.  Originally intending to do a 40 square wall hanging, I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide on the perfect layout before realizing that many of my squares were just too pale to fit nicely with the tone of the darker ones.  In the end, I found a nice 5 x 5 combination that I was happy with.  It was now midnight and I really should have gone to bed but instead, I started hand sewing the squares together. This is the finished piecing and yes, I realize some of the squares don't line up that neatly, but somehow it seemed okay at two in the morning. At any rate,it's a great souvenir of the weekend.

The plan is to use my dyed cotton yarn to weave a backing and border for this wall hanging and then to quilt it.  I'm quite happy with my dyed scarf. Most of the other participants meticulously ironed theirs; I crumpled it up and stitched a few chevrons on the edges.  This photo isn't great at showing all the depth of blue shadows that resulted, but they are there.

On the Sunday morning, we all had a bit of a show and tell and I couldn't resist taking some snaps of the other participants's work.  It just goes to show the endless possibilities both of pattern and colour.

But see that cotton skein below in four different shades of blue?  I was chuffed when Alison asked me (trusted me really) to dye it for her.  She wanted four distinct shades; I'm going to do something similar when I set up an indigo dye bath in the back yard next summer.  Yes, I will do it!  It's so much fun.  I also love her napkin pattern - those white marks look like knitted stitches.

We were asked to bring a man's white dress shirt to dye.  Monday morning's class was all about turning a man's shirt into something more feminine by cutting away the stiffer parts around the collar, button bands and cuffs, changing the shape and reusing discarded bits. We also learned about the Japanese boro - the art of mending with decorative stitches.  I love the look of Sarah's shirt when she unstitched the darts.

Catherine used reverse applique on the back of her shirt, using bits of her silk scarf. I think it looks amazing.

Here's my shirt in progress. I shortened the sleeves and will use the dyed cuffs as tabs to keep the sleeves rolled up. I removed the stiff interfacing from the collar which I had dipped in the dye bath and I cut away part of the tail of the shirt at the back.  That material which is dyed the darkest will form a pocket.  I also added some darts on the front of the shirt and purposely made them visible.

This was a really fun project and I really need to finish it off - I should have the perfect work shirt for next summer's dyeing.

It was a great and productive weekend.  I met so many interesting and inspiring people from all over the UK, one woman from Minnesota and another from Switzerland.  And it was so refreshing to be able to take out the needles whenever I wanted; we knitted at breakfast, during workshops, at lunch, in the pub, watching Downton Abbey on Sunday night - my fingers actually were quite sore by the end of it, especially as I got quite a lot of knitting done on the train ride home too.  But it was so marvellous to be able to completely absorb myself in creativity and craft for five days and to share that enthusiasm with a group of like-minded obsessives.  The next Gwlana will take place in May 2016 - a different location and set-up, but it should be as equally enjoyable.  More information as it becomes available will be posted here.

Season of Mists and Grellow Fruitfulness. . .

It's the first day of November and the Liverpud and I decided to do our favourite long-way-in walk into town, via four parks and the Mersey.  It was a mild and absolutely still morning with mysterious mist everywhere.  I really miss the intensity of colour that a Canadian autumn delivers, but on a day like this, the greys and yellows have their own muted beauty.

And when we got down to the Mersey, it too was many shades of grey as sky, water and sand all blended into one smudgey palette.

Gwlana 2015 Part One: Mood Indigo. . .

I've spent most of this week recovering from last weekend's Gwlana retreat which was so amazingly inspirational and such fun.  My head has been buzzing with ideas and projects and since I was basically running on coffee, profiteroles and adrenaline most of the time, I've had to catch up on some much needed sleep before being able to process it all.

Gwlana, which is Welsh for woolgathering, is a series of annual retreats run by Brenda Dayne of Cast-On podcast fame. It's a four day retreat held at a lovely hotel in the heart of Pembrokeshire and you basically spend four days knitting, attending great workshops, knitting, eating, chatting with interesting people, knitting, eating, making friends, buying yarn, knitting, eating, and jotting down creative to-do and to-finish lists that ae far too long. 

This autumn's theme was all things indigo, something I've been really keen to learn more about.  The workshops included practicing Japanese shibori techniques, learning how to hand dye with indigo,  incorporating colours into your knitting, and making do and mending with Japanese boro stitching and repurposing old clothing. 

We spent the first day preparing all sorts of material for the dye bath.  In terms of fabric, we were given a goodie bag in hemp (which could be dyed), a cotton tea towel and set of four napkins, and a silk scarf. We were also asked to bring a man's white dress shirt from a charity shop and anything else relatively small that we wanted to dye.  I grabbed nine solid colour squares from a quilting charm pack in light blues and various shades of beige and brown.  Below are some of the techniques you can use to resist the dye - I tied material around a pole, scrunched it into odd shapes held with elastic bands, clamped geometric shapes to crisply ironed triangles, and went a bit free form with running stitch lines pulled tightly to create folds and gathers. 

And then we also got YARN!!!!!!  From left to right: a skein of superwash merino Aran, a skein of 100% silk, one of cotton, and a laceweight merino too.

We soaked everything in cold water overnight, and on Saturday, we made our way to the Village Hall where Caerthan Wrack (isn't that a fabulous name), of Triskelion Yarns and our resident dye-master, showed us how to set everything up. 

It doesn't look the most appetising, but just you wait. . .

The lovely thing about dyeing with indigo is watching the object emerge from the dye bath as a shade of yellow and then as the oxygen hits it, it starts to turn various shades of blue.  I could watch this alchemy all day long.

Honestly, how much fun is this? The photo in the bottom right shows how my different yarn fibres took the dye and the different intensity of colour I could get depending on the number of dips and how strong the dye bath was. 

Here is a shot of my dyed objects drying.  I particularly like how the tote bag turned out - I just dipped the bottom third in.

I went a little crazy snapping shots of everyone else's dyeing too - you can really see all the different shades that can be achieved, especially with the yarn.  You could go from the palest, almost seafoam green, to the deep midnight blue of the darkest denim.

And all of our shirts were hung outside in the sunshine to dry.  People passing by must have wondered what the heck was going on.



I hung my yarn up to dry in my hotel room overnight.  After soaking and rinsing several times to get the residual dye off, the colours do fade a little, but I was still so pleased with the end results.  The skein on the far right was an extra one of a Masham/BFL mixture that was naturally a rustic grey and turned into a lovely blue-silver after soaking it in the darkest dye bath.



Whew - and that was only the first two days.  I'll show you some of the further outcomes and works in progress in my next post.

Chuffed With My Baffies. . .

Kate Davies is a genius.  I've long admired her talent for designing beautiful and unique garments, taking stunning photographs and writing a wonderful blog, full of honesty and humour, in which she shares a real sense of the places and the history behind the things that inspire her.  When I read that she'd branched out into creating her own yarn, Buachaille - the Scottish name for shepherd -  and all the wool would be sourced in Scotland, and spun in Yorkshire, I was very, very excited. 

Turns out (no surprise there), that she's also a brilliant and shrewd business woman too.  She created the Seven Skeins Club, allowing members to get one 50g DK skein of each of the seven colours in her palette, and which probably allowed her to get a good sense of the initial demand for the yarn. She'll be offering it for general sale next year. You also get a tote bag and a book to come later, with not only patterns and more glorious photography, but recipes and essays on the landscape that inspired the yarn's colours, including one on climbing a Scottish mountain.  Sign me up! There was a flurry of excitement on ravelry once these details were announced and these memberships sold out in a few days.  

While waiting for the release date, Kate wrote some very interesting blog posts about all the processes involved; the scouring, the manufacturing, choosing and naming the colours. Then came the excitement of waiting for the yarn and it literally was shipped around the world!  As you can see, the colours are rich and gorgeous.

Then came the anticipation around the first pattern release. There will be seven in all, released over seven weeks, with variations on some for different skill levels.  Not only that (and this really does blow my mind), she's designed them to use up every bit of the seven skeins!  We've been instructed to weigh our skeins very carefully, and she's even sent out an excel file that calculates what should be left depending on the colours we choose for each project.  This whole venture has been so incredibly well thought out and not only that, but it's enormous FUN!  I've never seen a Kate Davies pattern that I didn't want to knit, so I'm jumping right into the spirit of it all, and embracing the mystery and challenge as it comes without waiting for the lot and then choosing my colours.

So the first pattern was released last Friday and I was not disappointed.  It was for a pair of baffies - the Scottish term for house slippers.  There was the choice to do either a striped pattern or one that also includes some stranded knitting.  I chose the former and debated for ages about what colour to knit them in, but in the end went for Islay, a lovely teal, but actually my least favourite of the colours (I want to save that deep orange for a hat or mittens, something I can show off!).  But as it turns out, I absolutely love how the teal goes with the dark grey (Squall - what a fabulous name for a colourway). The fit is perfect and they really are quite cute.

Kate writes very clear patterns and I always learn something new.  In this case, it was the Turkish cast-on which is brilliant for toe-up socks and creates a very neat edge.

This was the perfect weekend project and my baffies are really warm and cozy.  I anticipate wearing them more as bedsocks now that the nights have gotten very chilly.  I love the i-cord trim which finishes them off, but I did need to go up two needle sizes to ensure they weren't too tight.

Then it was off to weigh my remaining yarn and fill out my excel sheet. Can't wait to see what's next.

She's a genius, I tell you.  

Two Walks From Edale, Part Two: On the Day, I Go in a Different Direction, Up to the Southern Edge of Kinder Scout and See a Lot of Weird Rock Formations. . .

In my last post I wrote about doing the recce of a ridge walk from Edale to Jacob's Ladder, and up towards Mam and Back Tor via Brown Knoll.   I was geared up to repeat the walk again the following weekend with our rambling group, especially since the weather promised to be dry and clear. 

That walk was a "B" or medium walk, about 10.5 miles.  But on the day, when I read that the route for the "A" or harder walk, included that last pretty stretch, but started much further out and included new (to me) territory, I abandoned the Liverpud (with his blessing) and the B party, and decided on the A walk instead. 

This walk heads off in a completely different direction, up onto the southern edge of Kinder Scout, the huge plateau that dominates this part of the Peak District.  As you can see, visibility was much clearer.

This is about half way up the path - we're heading for that long ridge at the top.

Once up, you get great views of the valley, including the ridge on the other side that we'll end our walk on.

And you start to see the first of many really interesting stone formations that have been weathered by rain and wind into all sorts of fluid, amoeba-like shapes that are oddly compelling to look at.

You also cross many small streams that cascade down into the valley.  Fortunately they were easy to ford on the day as the water wasn't at full force.

You can see how the path just seems to go on forever.  It's an absolutely lovely ridge walk.

With a riot of fall colours all around you.

You then approach an area called the Wool Packs and these clusters of rocks become much bigger and are grouped closer to each other, almost hugging the path.

It's like being let loose in a giant outdoor sculpture museum; I haven't felt this playful on a walk for a long time.  As you can see, I couldn't stop taking photos as the path continued to turn and twist among them.

A great place to stop and have lunch.  No shortage of seats. 

But the A walk doesn't have time to stop for long and the leader puts on quite a bit of a pace.  So after lunch, it was a brisk march down off the ridge following the bridleway which you can see in the middle of the photo below, and then up the other side - a very steep climb up to the summit of Mount Famine. 

Still climbing towards the top and loving the clouds.

At the top of Mount Famine, we had a feast; one of our group had baked a really delicious lemon drizzle cake!

From this ridge we made our way onto Brown Knoll, looking quite vibrant in the late afternoon sunshine, but rather more boggy than on the recce. At one point I placed one foot wrong and sank down in the mud, nearly to my knee -  ugh.

It was around 4pm when I took this last photo and I was starting to flag and despairing at how far we still had to go.  It was also starting to get quite cold, so I couldn't really enjoy that last stretch along the ridge towards Mam Tor (and had no energy to take photos).  Somehow I made it back and took comfort in the fact that quite a few of us were feeling sore and very tired.  I'm still glad I did it though.  I think if one were to take the first part of this walk - the wonderful Kinder Scout edge - and then cut out Mount Famine and go directly to Brown Knoll and on to Mam Tor, you'd have the makings of one almost perfect walk.  It's certainly what I'd do the next time.