A creative outlet
A creative outlet for various stuff I have made
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I had a fantastic time yesterday on Susan Crawford’s colour technique knitting workshop at Purlesque. This is my first attempt at Fair Isle knitting, which I’m quite pleased with. I haven’t cast it off yet as I might make it into something, I haven’t decided yet. I really enjoyed Fair Isle knitting and feel confident now that I could have a go at the wartime farm sleeveless pullover that I’ve had my eye on for a while now.
During the day I used circular needles for the first time and had a go at intarsia. My brain was pretty fried by then so I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of it yet, but am going to practice and finish the intarsia bunny that I started, so hope to get better.
We had a great group on the course yesterday, especially Kim whose soundtrack of “Arse” and “Fiddlesticks” vocalised perfectly what I was thinking a lot of the time. Topped off with a delicious lunch by Harri, it was a brilliant, if mentally tiring, day.
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I’ve wanted to have a go at felting for years, and finally got the chance when I booked on a Feltipedia workshop with some friends. Technically it was supposed to be a cobweb scarf workshop but mine ended up much thicker than it was supposed to with very few holes. I made the daft mistake of choosing fibres in a similar colour to the towel that I had as a base, so couldn’t see clearly how spaced out they were and ended up putting more on than I should have just to be safe.
Anyway, we had a fun day and I’m quite pleased with the result, so that’s what’s important. Nicola, who ran the workshop, was a good tutor and had an amazing goody bag of optional extras to decorate our scarves with, so we all ended up with very different results. I chose a sparkly wool for tassles, with a bit more embedded within the scarf itself. I also used some wiggly white soy bean fibres and bluey-green silk nibs (or nubs?), which are lovely and shiny now they’ve dried out. We got to keep our leftover materials, so I’ll try to make a thinner, more cobwebby scarf one day.
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To help make the Walker Art Gallery a bit more festive - and with the artst’s full blessing - I offered to knit a little Santa hat for one of the colourful pigeons that are currently standing on the roof as part of installation Belonging. It went down very well so I made a few more.
We took the hats up to put on the pigeons on a beautiful sunny morning in December. Jason from the Echo took some photos and my hats made it into the paper, which was pretty cool.
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This year the Knitwits (my knitting group at work) made Secret Santa pressies for each other. We decided to make Christmas tree decorations - they didn’t have to be knitted as long as they were hand crafted, and there was a spending limit of £5 on materials.
As I had a few festive mini cross stitch kits from last Christmas (including this Father Christmas) I backed this one with red felt and put a ribbon loop at the top. It worked quite well so I think I’ll do the same for the others.
Please don’t tell any of the Knitwits that I made this if you know them!
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These are the hats I made for the 2012 innocent smoothies big knit. As I had yarn left over after making a rainbow mushroom mobile I decided to start by making rainbow hats. I really love how they turned out, but having seven different colours in each hat did mean that I spent as long sewing in ends as I did knitting. This wasn’t a problem as I knitted most of the hats while I was travelling round Europe for a few weeks in August and September, so the knitting and sewing ends in helped to pass the time on a few long train journeys. I wouldn’t normally have the patience to sew in the ends for so many colours, so I expect I’ll be back to simpler stripes and patterns next year.
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I enjoyed knitting mushrooms so much for the Woolly Wildlife project that I couldn’t resist making a rainbow mushroom mobile for baby Amy (her mum likes mushrooms, I really hope that she does too and this doesn’t give her nightmares!)
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The last things I made for the Woolly Wildlife project were these mushrooms. The brown ones are field mushrooms and the red and white ones are fly agaric. The patterns (taken from a Lesley Stanfield book) are so good that staff at the Natural History Centre at World Museum were able to identify the species, which was rather cool.
See the National Museums Liverpool blog for more information about the Woolly wildlife project.
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After knitting and crocheting some flowers for the Woolly Wildlife project I decided to make some fan seaweed for a change. This involved learning the thumb cast on method, which Wendy taught me in the park one lunchtime. I could only get my head round it when she made sound effects like a train, which sounds odd but it works.
See the National Museums Liverpool blog for more information about the Woolly Wildlife project.
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Over the summer staff and visitors to World Museum have been knitting and crocheting lots of woolly wildlife for a display in the Weston Discovery Centre. After the summer everything in the displays will be donated to Claire House to sell in their shops.
I decided this was a good excuse to do Purlesque’s crocheted flowers workshop, which was great fun as we sat in the sun at Cuthbert’s and had great cake and a good chat as well as learning lots of new crochet stitches. I also knitted a couple of white roses from an old pattern.
See the National Museums Liverpool blog for more information about the Woolly wildlife project.
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This year I took part in my knitting group’s Olympic knitting challenge, which just means that you start a project during the Olympic opening ceremony and have to finish by the end of the games.
Following the sport theme, I decided to make something for the Liverpool Roller Birds and knitted these wrist warmers from the Pretty in Punk pattern book, using their yellow and black colours. Knitting the heart was my first attempt at Fair Isle knitting, but apart from that it’s quite a straightforward pattern. This suited me fine as I’m a slow knitter, so I didn’t want to take on anything too challenging.
I enjoyed the opening ceremony so much that I didn’t knit a stitch during it, but managed to catch up and finish on time. I think they’re quite cute and hope the Roller Birds like them.
Thanks to Pete for taking the photo :)
