A little sheepish - baby blanket auction for Save the Children

Little baby blanket for Save the children

The troublesome baby blanket is finally completed and the finished article is rather sweet. A little image of Woolly Facade appears in the corner.  The pure Shetland wool in cream and the super soft naturally coloured yarn spun from Cashgora and 30% Manx Loghton rare breed wool are rather special. It's made a lovely cosy little cover up for a small baby - just right for a first size car carrier/seat.

As Christmas is coming up I decided to auction it for charity via EBay. A 100% of the proceeds will be going to Save the Children. The auction is running now and until 11th December Item 290640589687

Knitting at the ready - a little reflection for Poppy Day

I love old books. The other day I was searching the bookcases for a crumbling copy of Winnie the Pooh I knew I had somewhere. But when I opened a rather dusty book I had put my hand on it took me by surprise. Not A.A. Milne but a war time fictionalisation of  real life on a RAF station in World War II entitled Readiness at Dawn by "Blake". I flipped through the black and white photographs peppered through the book - on the last page one paragraph caught my eye.

The year was 1941. It was the early hours of the morning in the operations room....
" The map was empty. The W.A.A.F. with the gasp was reading her poetry again. Two others were knitting service garments, and one a baby's jacket. The men sat and read, or wrote letters or just sat and smoked and did nothing. The hard light beat down on the scene. The telephones were quiet."


The power of a simple task like knitting to calm the nerves, to provide the bare necessities for war heroes and to add to the little tinge of expectation for a new life to come just struck home to me. These days you often come across great nostalgia for the 1940's vintage style but the tragic reality of the era is not one we should forget.

Back to square one with joined up knitting - don't forget to plan your knitting

Baby blanket reverse side

Oh dear! Sometimes its just the basics that trip you up. I have a habit, not a very clever one I know now, of setting off with some random knitting without really knowing what it going to become. This happens most often when we are setting off somewhere in the car and I haven't had chance to organise some knitting to do while in the passenger seat. I often end up just throwing an odd ball of wool and some knitting needles in my bag and start casting on... Something like this happened a few weeks ago.

I had half an idea about making a baby blanket  with little sheep motifs and I some nicely toning shades of cream, brown and grey. But I had already knitted a small mountain of  4" stocking stitch squares before I realised that adding  a 1" border between all the squares was not going to be a very neat idea. And that the grey wool - an early attempt at hand spinning - was far too rough for a baby blanket. So three tone became two tone and half the squares had to be re-knitted.

Joining up the squares remained a problem.  Montese Stanley's Handknitter's Handbook couldn't help me. She devoted a whole chapter to edges and joining emphasising over and again  the particular importance of  formation of the edge stitches on any piece of knitting. I tried several methods of joining with contrast wool but none were really satisfactory. James Norbury's single and wise suggestion was to begin and end each square with 2 rows of garter stitch and begin and end each row in the same way. Making it possible to join with a simple flat seam.

Joined up squares

Some progress has at last been made. I liked the idea of having ridges around the squares on one side and I have finally achieved this by using my linker and my sewing machine. But all those ends to sort out - what a chore and what a time waster!

I will never go down the road with small squares again or set off without a proper plan and preparation. My old Grandma, who knitted all those huge blankets, will be laughing her socks off.

Spare the rod! - first steps in natural dyeing with Golden Rod

Golden Rod dyed wool with the very plants it came from

Its wool week in the UK and I have finally put some time aside to have a go at natural dying. It seems a long time ago now that I first came across Michel Garcia founder of  Couleur Garance*, a botanical garden of dye plants, set in the Chateau de Lauris in Provence. I heard about this magical place via a podcast from the fascinating website of the MAIWA foundation** a Canadian organisation set up in 1997 by MAIWA handprints to help eradicate poverty in rural villages in poorer countries. Sadly I have not been there yet but it inspired me to see what I could do in my own back garden. Its taken me a while but I am pleased as Punch that I tried it out.

Looking round the garden for suitable plants earlier this year I was a bit miffed to find out that the massive yellow plants I had been trying to eradicate for several years was Golden Rod. A perfect plant for dying yellow it's really hard to control once it's on your patch. This years outcrop had to be spared and ideally I had to get it used while the flowers were at their best. I just made it.

I had been looking out for a suitable dye pot for quite a while. Dye pots must be either stainless steel, glass or enamel if you do not want it to affect the finished colour and I wanted it pretty big . I couldn't find anything in my usual haunts for second hand bargains. But a couple of weeks ago a chap round the corner was having a garage sale. He had some lovely antique woodworking tools which were hard to resist and while we were talking I asked if he happened to have any large stainless steel pots he wanted rid of. Next thing he has hopped off to his kitchen and I'm left in charge of the garage sale. He came back with a rather posh steamer complete with inner bowl, strainer and lid. Rather smaller, more complicated and more expensive than my original idea but he turned out to be a right salesman and I left £15 lighter clutching the said pot.

As it turns out the pot with all its extras is ideal. I managed to dye about 4 ozs of wool at a time and it would probably do more.  I decided against throwing the wool in with the flowers and boiled up about 4 or 5 heads for 45 minutes or so before straining. I had forgotten about mordanting the wool so the dye was left outside in tub for a week before I found the mordant kit purchased from George Weil  many months ago. The alum mordant didn't seem too scary, so another 45 minutes of wool simmering ensued before my white Shetland wool finally went into the dye pot for a further 25 minutes.

Getting the wool so hot for so long seemed counter intuitive but luckily I remembered reading that felting is caused by agitation and sudden changes in temperature. So you rinse in hot water first and gradually reduce the temperature of the wool.

I was really chuffed with the results, I was expecting it to be a bit murky but it came out a rich yellow. A second batch in the part exhausted dye pot gave me a lovely primrose.

Next up the onion skins, I have been collecting for a year.

Wooly
*You can get a flavour of the dye garden at  http://www.frenchgardening.com/visitez.html?pid=12016936941558680
**http://www.maiwa.com/foundation/index.html

Come fly with me - butterfly slip stitch

Gate keeper butterfly - photo Peter Morley

We seem to have had a lot more butterflies in the garden this year, maybe its the presence of the runner beans which are knitting their way up the old  aerials, internet and TV cables at the side of the living room window. I had a few early plants in pots, intended for the allotment but other things got the better of me and before I knew it they were completely enmeshed. I put the roots in a big tub they are a bit muddled up but  they are romping away.

Butterfly slip stitch

I have been having a little look at butterfly stitches. There is a  lacy, quite fiddly one, but this really easy butterfly slip stitch pattern is really effective. I came across it in an old (1951) Foyles Handbook by Eunice Close. The stitch pattern for the motif is on the stitch pattern page.

What the Dickens was Madame Defarge really knitting?

Madame Defarge

 Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large ear-rings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way.

Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

It’s Bastille Day today which has reminded me of the time I took last year to read the Charles Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities, having been prompted to do so when I came across a great, 2005, online article “Top 10 men in knitting” by Anne Richards in Knitty .com http://knitty.com/ISSUEsummer05/FEATtopten.html

I wondered if there was any significance in the fact that the two most quoted lines from the book are actually the first sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..” and the last, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...” But to find out what Dickens actually did have to say about Madame Defarge and the knitting meant going cover to cover squinting along all 58 lines per page of my Victorian copy. Sadly not a first edition but printed just about in his lifetime.

I soon discovered that Madame Defarge was nothing like the little slip of a woman depicted in the line drawing in this early edition, she was a big strapping woman, well fed and well clothed, unlike her customers and wretched neighbours who were close to starving.

Dickens was a wonderful observer but I’m not sure he totally understood the business of knitting. I could be very wrong; but his suggestion that the women knitted useless things merely to take their mind off how hungry they were does not really add up.
"They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched."
 If you were next to starving you would not be buying wool to knit to pass the time. More likely, as happened elsewhere, you would be knitting a merchants wool into hose for a pittance. Knitting none stop, day and night, while you walked, and while you talked. Polite knitting in the drawing room did not really happen until Victorian times.

Madame Defarge, however, took great care of her rather better income from the wine shop and room lettings. At one point she claimed to be knitting as a pastime, and later, more pointedly, to be knitting a shroud.  In fact it was always her deadly knitted register of names marked for retribution - come the revolution. But at the end of the day the list “knitted in her own stitches and her own symbols” to be “always as plain to her as the sun” was of limited value once she “the tigress”, had met her comeuppance at the hands of poor little Miss Pross. No one else would be able to interpret it.

A pretty pattern, it was said – I guess it was multicoloured. but knitted in the round or just two pins?

Well it was all a bit more complicated, and metaphorical - but never the less a cracking good yarn!

Hats off! Fair Isle beret meets Tam O'Shanter

With Sheila's admonishments still ringing in my ears I just felt I had to try harder at circular knitting. At the end of  her book a spread of amazing knitted "tammy" hats in fantastic concentric Fair Isle patterns were said to be much easier to make than to describe. That they relied on a double slip stitch decrease was all the information given. I set off to make a small hat for a child and along the way I met some very interesting people.

As I began, I got curious about why these hats are called "Tammies" and  who exactly was Tam O'Shanter? and I finally got round to reading the epic Robert Burns poem. Only half comprehending it, even in translation, I gather he was a bit of a lad for the booze and the ladies who got a bad scare to the detriment of  his horse. His "good blue bonnet" apparently referred to a Kilmarnock bonnet, - heavy duty head gear from which a man would seldom be parted inside or outside.

O dear! by then  I'm totally hooked into finding out more about the mysteries of  these knitted Scottish bonnets.  Historical hats were coming thick and fast from Glengarry's and Atholl's  in regimental dress to berets and forage caps. Fascinating.... you can read more about how they were made at
http://futuremuseum.co.uk/Collection.aspx/bonnet_making/Description

Sally Pointer is also something of an expert when it comes recreating these historical caps and she has some interesting traditional tools too. See  http://www.sallypointer.com/shop/

For this little effort I started off using trusty James Norbury's instructions for beret shaping. So this hat has a tight rim, rather than a rib and is increased out before turning back in for the crown. But then I discovered Ruskin on Ravelry whose splendid Greenvoe pattern explained that knitting a straight tube and then decreasing just within the central crown would do the job. The centre shaping is more Ruskin that Norbury and I completed the job by gentle  washing and drying it to shape over a plate. I decided against a pom pom as this quite a lightweight little hat for maybe a two/three year old. 

As Sheila said in her book making one is a lot easier than it looks or is to describe. I'll try to add an outline of how I made it on the patterns page as soon as I can.