Last Saturday I packed some knitting and two boys and headed off to Flat Planet in Central London to join in the Love Knitting/Knit for Peace World Wide Knit in Public event. 

We couldn't get there early so everything was already in full swing when we arrived. To be honest it was a little daunting walking into a cafe full of chatting people who I didn't know, with the hope of joining in.

Then I remembered that these aren't just people, these are knitters.  

A simple, "Do we just find a seat?" led to people shifting up, others changing chairs and the three of us were all sat down together, a little snug, but happy. The boys were amazingly well-behaved - with some help from loom bands, cake and an iPad - so I was able to chat and knit and knit and chat some more.

I ended up spending the entire day Knitting in Public one way or another - at cricket, on the tube,  in the cafe and again in the tube on the way home. A few years ago I would have been too embarrassed to knit on public transport. In my head I imagined all the other passengers turning to stare at me, sirens going off and the train driver announcing, "Can the strange lady in carriage five please put those pointed sticks down and pick up a newspaper like everyone else."

Of course this says a lot about me at the time and not much about knitting. And it's not just because of knitting's 'revival', and because it's 'cool' nowadays to be creative with yarn that I can get my sticks and string out in public. It's because I realised that it doesn't matter whether it's cool or not, I just like it.

The Fall 2014 Knitty is out today and I'm very taken with Indigo Cones - the drape, the style, the dark blue: all wrapped up into one very wearable, very pretty summer cardi.

And judging how slow the Knitty website is at the moment, I think there are plenty of other people taking a look too.

Time to throw off my slippers and shawl, clear a pathway to the front door through the yarn and cats and prove to the man-on-the-street that knitters aren't just crazy old ladies with pointy sticks.  Aha, yes there are crazy young people out there with pointy sticks too! 

Take your pick of dates between 14 - 22 June as your World Wide Knit in Public Day.  I'm going to the Love Knitting / Knit for Peace event in central London on Saturday 21st, and then having a picknit with the lovely Redbridge NCT Knitters on the 22nd.  (It's a closed Facebook group, but feel free to join if you're local.)

As fab as it is to have an excuse to get out and meet other knitters, I wonder how long this event will last as a thing? I see more and more knitters out and about, and I already knit outside whenever I can sit down for longer than 60 seconds.  Still, I really am looking forward to my weekend of knitting.

I'm a bit disheartened with my own knitting this week. I've been messing about with a cotton yarn for my contoured intarsia ideas, but the lack of elasticity means the yarn doesn't have the forgiveness I need to keep the frequent increases and decreases tidy.  I've got a couple more ideas, but I'd really wanted to be actually working on my summer top by now.  Ah well, knitting and patience go hand in hand I guess.

I've done a lot more swatching than 'end product' knitting over the past year. Luckily I like swatching. Clara Parkes talks about swatching as 'taking your yarn for a walk' - not just as a means to check gauge, but as a way of getting to know it, to see if you're going to get along and where your yarn might best be employed. I've been 'taking my ideas for a walk' over the past year and it's been fun - sometimes frustrating, sometimes rewarding - and there's still more exploring to do.

So I've made very little this year, apart from a big pile of colour-clashing swatches.  As much as I've loved it, I've been itching to get an actual thing on my needles, some tangible proof of my efforts with contoured intarsia. 

A good knitting friend's thirtieth birthday gave me the opportunity, though a May birthday excluded anything too cosy and I decided on a bag.  She's a fellow cat-lover, so I wanted to incorporate a cat motif that I've been working on.

And I used a diamond pattern on the back:

There's a definite texture with contoured intarsia that isn't there with traditional intarsia.  I have to admit to blocking these with the quick and effective treatment of placing a wet tea-towel on the knitting and blasting it with a hot iron. The blocking works its magic, but the texture isn't completely tamed. I see it as part of the charm. 

What do you think? I have loads of ideas for what to do next, but I'm currently doing more swatching, with cotton this time, to see if I can persuade an inelastic, less forgiving fibre to work with this technique. I'm not convinced yet, but I'll keep trying because I have a summer top in my mind that won't go away.

Wendy x

Last Saturday I went down to the Grand Opening Day of Wild and Woolly, a yarn shop which has just opened its doors on Lower Clapton Road in East London. I had already heard that Anna, the owner, was stocking some dribble-worthy yarns, and I wasn't disappointed.

I went with a friend, who was taking her first yarn shop trip (and on her birthday too), plus my two boys and one of her children.  We were greeted with a busy shop, and there's nothing that warms my heart more than to see lots of people in a yarn shop.  Within moments a plate of cake was in the children's hands and a glass of bubbly was in mine, and I could tell that I was going to like it there.

The children were also set up making pom-poms, so for the first time in years - years! - I had all the time that I wanted to gaze at, squish, stroke and take in the heady scent of yarn in a yarn shop. Thinking about it, the last time I even tried to go to a yarn shop with children was when my eldest was about 18 months old. He played a game that went something like: 'See how many balls of yarn you can you pull off the shelf before your mummy catches up with you - while she simultaneously collects and replaces the yarn that you're dispatching to the four corners of the shop!' Great fun for everyone! Except mummy. And the yarn shop owner.

One squish was enough to know I was going to buy this:

It's West Yorkshire Spinners' British Mohair. It's like owning my own personal cloud, with just a touch of crispness alongside the fluff to intrigue the senses. I placed it on my swift ready to wind into a yarn cake and marvelled at its drapy wispiness.

I haven't yet decided what I'm going to knit with it: my youngest wants a minecraft sheep and I'm considering that. But I'm also mourning the loss of the original twist of cloud; I need to buy another one just to keep!

There is a lot of colour in Anna's shop too, it's just I'm in a sheepy phase at the moment.  And of course you can never have enough sock yarn.

So thank you to Anna for my wonderful yarn, plus a Grand Day Out. I will be returning, even if I have to take my own bubbly.

I love the way there's always something new to learn about knitting.  I'm not talking entrelac, steeking, double knitting, intricate lace and all the rest of that complicated stuff, I'm talking decreasing. 

Of course you know how to k2tog for a right leaning decrease, and you've outgrown skpo and moved onto SSK for a left-leaning decrease. You might know how to do their equivalents on a purl row. You might even know about the improved SSK (although it doesn't improve much for me I have to admit). 

But if you know about working through the back of the stitch in the row above an SSK and you haven't told me, then I may have to reassess our friendship.

I've been playing with 'contoured' or 'shaped' intarsia for nearly a year now, which involves increasing and decreasing either side of the colour change in intarsia in order to make a smooth 'contoured' line instead of the traditional intarsia pixellated line.  Because of this I have a geeky obsession with increases and decreases. I follow links on Pinterest, I watch video tutorials on YouTube and I can safely say I know an unhealthy number of ways to increase and decrease in my knitting. 

But I never knew that if you work into the back of the stitch in the row above an SSK then it does marvellous things.

Imagine you've worked an SSK on a knit row (I'll call it Row 1). Then when you purl back along Row 2, purl into the back of that SSK stitch from Row 1:

Below, on the  left of the picture I've worked a few rows of SSKs on the knit row and then just purled that stitch on the next row as usual.  On the right of the picture I've worked an SSK on the knit row and then purled into the back of that stitch on the next row:

How beautiful is that row of decreases on the right compared to those on the left?

I learnt about this little trick in a video from Cat Bordhi, where she explains the 'hungry stitch' technique. She uses a slipped stitch on the row below the SSK to remove excess yarn out of the SSK and neaten up the decrease even further. She mentions, almost in passing, to work into the back of the stitch on the row above.  The 'hungry stitch' is too complicated for me on my contoured intarsia patterns, which are already a little bit crazy. But that working into the back of the stitch thing - that is beautiful.

Wendy x

I've just finished the last square of a blanket I've been working on, and added it to the top of this pile of thirteen unblocked squares. It's a big blanket, so it's taken a while. Plus I have previously put it aside for long periods of time, so the first square was knitted a fair while ago. How long ago, I hear you ask? Hmm... let me think about it... 

My inspiration for the blanket was the print below; Fish Festival by Seb West. I first saw the print hanging on the wall in a bed and breakfast hotel room. I liked it so much that I bought a copy once I was back home. Then I got that feeling that comes when there's a little flame of a knitting idea that won't go out.  I wanted a blanket. 

In a fine example of my ability to point out the obvious, I called it "The Fish Blanket". I started in a bustle of enthusiasm and a large pile of Rowan Handknit DK Cotton in many beautiful shades.  I love that yarn - a tight twist and so 'full' that it's almost impossible to split it - unlike so many other cotton yarns. 

These days I'm a hardcore intarsia enthusiast: if I've not got at least 3 yarns, preferably more, twisting into knots as I work then my knitting feels a bit naked. But back then, three months straight intarsia knitting was long enough, so after an initial burst I put the blanket to one side for a break.  

According to my spreadsheet - stop smirking, I like a spreadsheet - I then knit my way through Flighty, Buster, Drift and, having found out I was pregnant with my first, another intarsia blanket for baby. I found my way back to The Fish Blanket for a month or so, but by then baby was taking up almost all the knitting room I had in my head.  So I worked out how much Rowan Handknit DK Cotton I would need to complete the blanket and bought it all in one expensive trip to the yarn department at Liberty.

The Fish Blanket has had its own large Work In Progress box ever since. And my "baby" turns ten this summer.

When I told The Knitting Girls that I'd finished the last square of the blanket, one of them asked me if I felt a bit sad that it was nearly finished.  I told her that I didn't, that I had only ever felt good things about this blanket, it was never a millstone. I've always been happy to get it out, happy to work on it, happy to put it away again, and I'll be happy to finish it. That's a lot of happy.

So my pile of thirteen squares is now blocked, but they still need to be seamed together and joined to the rest of the blanket. For the border I think I might stick to applied i-cord - something fairly simple anyway.

One column and one border of happy knitting left. Here's to a happy ending!

Wendy x

I saw this Garter Stitch Square Bunny on Pinterest. The knitting part is so easy - just a garter stitch square - that I tried it out to see if it would be any good for the school knitting group that I'm hoping to set up. The school is in a state of upheaval at the moment with the long-standing headteacher leaving at Easter, so they've asked for the group to be put on hold for a while.  I'm hanging on in there though; those children are desperate to learn to knit, I just know it.

To make the bunny, I used...
A small quantity of DK yarn
4mm needles
Toy stuffing
A contrast colour for the pompom tail.
A blunt-ended sewing needle.

Cast on 23 stitches, knit in garter stitch until you have a square. (Tip: to check if you've knitted a square without using a ruler, lift a corner of the cast on edge up to the diagonally opposite corner on the needle.  If the edges are aligned then you've got a square.) Cast off.

Use running stitch to sew a triangle shape on the knitted square, as in the picture. Obviously it's better to use matching yarn for the sewing.

Pull on the ends to make your bunny's face and ears.  Put some stuffing in the head area.  

Adjust the ears so that they point nicely forwards and then pull the running stitch tight and securely sew everything closed between the ears. .

Use mattress stitch to close up the seam on bunny's back...

... making sure to pull to close the seam neatly (my favourite bit).

Put stuffing inside the body and then use mattress stitch to sew up the end seam.

Use running stitch all the way from the bottom of the rabbit up to the base of the ears and then pull tight and secure to give bunny the nice rounded shape.
This bit is a little fiddly and I had to experiment a little to get it right. Make sure the yarn is secured very well at the top.

You can use a fork to make a small pompom for the tail.  Lay a shortish (20cm) length of yarn through the middle tines of the fork, then start winding a long length of yarn around the fork width. When you've finished, tie the shorter yarn tightly around the wound yarn. Pull it off the fork and then cut the loops just as you would normally when making a pompom. It will need neatening up with scissors to make a nice rounded shape.

Firmly attach tail to bunny.

I'm in two minds as to whether this is a useful project for a children's knitting group. The square itself needs to be quite neat and robust to stop stuffing poking out, while beginners often have tension issues and holes. Plus it's fairly tricky to sew the bunny together, as you have to hold everything tight while its secured into place. Maybe too tricky for a child. 

It's cute though.

Wendy x

Today's sunshine persuaded me that the time had finally arrived for the fresh air and exercise that I keep promising myself. The boys and I went out on an easy bike ride this morning to avoid too many complaints of exhaustion from my youngest. But he is now seven and finally, finally, he enjoyed the cycling.  He was speeding along ahead of me, rather than needing constant encouragement and reassurance that there was almost no chance he would die before the top of the hill. 

Back at home we got a little too hot - crazy! - doing some gardening. Cycling and gardening are two of my very favourite activities, though you'd never believe that from how little I do of them.  I get on my bike; I am happy.  I dig up some weeds or plant a seed; I am happy. But when I think about doing these wonderfully fulfilling activities I almost always manage to come up with an excuse to put it off until another time.  I'm sure there's some good evolutionary reason for this, conservation of precious energy resources or something, but it Will Not Do.

It was so uplifting to be outside but not cold - or rather not wet, as far as this past winter was concerned. I have high hopes that this summer there will be plenty of cycling and gardening.

Knitting news... I have not much to show for myself; my knitting time has mostly been taken up with swatching recently, and they're highly experimental swatches and not very pretty. It's fun doing crazy stuff with yarn and needles though.

And the Charlie the Cat knitting kit is on hold for a little while, as other work has become a priority for now.  Hopefully he'll be written up as a pattern at some point though; I am fond of him and his little friend Tiddler.

Wendy x

It seems I have made a nice cat cushion.

Wendy x

It was my birthday last week. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, not least because we had a party at Knit Night, with a delicious, flamboyant cake and prosecco. The girls wore badges professing their love for me.  I was very embarrassed and a little flattered, just as they'd planned. 

I was also given this:

My very own hand-knitted Muddy Sheep! And he is knitting!

Receiving any knitted gift is always wonderful for me. As a knitter I can imagine the trials and emotions invested in that gift:

I imagine the knitter's mind wandering as they knit, thinking what the recipient will say when they see it, and maybe chuckling inwardly at the thought.  

I imagine the apprehension the knitter feels that it might not look as good in reality as it does in their imagination.  
 
I imagine there's a good chance that the knitter underestimated the time it would take to complete - despite having underestimated many times in the past already (or is that just me?). So I imagine them cursing as they find themselves knitting at break-neck speed to get it finished in time. 

And finally I imagine the satisfaction when it's done: when that perfect button has been located, the mattress stitch has worked its magic again, and all the fiddly ends are sewn in.

I knew all that in my heart when I was given that gift, and now I've put it into words.  Thank you to all my Knit Night friends for a wonderful party. And for my Muddy Sheep, thank you Karen.

Wendy x