I've been a "silent blogger" for the past two months, busy with work and knitting projects for work colleagues who are embracing motherhood for the first time. City and Guilds has been a bit on the back-burner but did inspire a full-on exploration of entrelac, which led me to select this Debbie Bliss pattern for one of the baby knits. And before things got so frantically busy, I enjoyed designing my own combination of stitch patterns like this one for Module 6. 
It has been a rich although sometimes confusing time and I've been wondering about my life's purpose along the way. Things suddenly became much clearer on Tuesday and I now have the sense of a vision of the way forward, that includes knitting and my connection to Shetland. This picture of a sculpture in London that we saw during birthday celebrations for my other half's 50th in September sums up the exuberance that I'm currently feeling (even though it looks a bit windy and my sense of balance is a bit dodgy!). 
The conference on Shetland in September was wonderful - awesomely good weather and a splendid crowd of people attending and presenting. This is honestly a picture of Lerwick Harbour during the event, with some of the conference participants enjoying the sunshine. There is so much interest in Shetland knitting traditions and it was really good to watch people discover the place for themselves. There was a write-up in The Knitter (issue 24) and probably elsewhere too. We took possession of our new house while we were up there and the picture below is the view from my bedroom window there, down at the south end of the mainland near Sumburgh Head. 
The Oxford Summer School is nearly upon us and New Directions in Knitting is almost fully booked. I'm really looking forward to it and think it is going to be good fun. There are still one or two places left if you want to join us and find out what you can do with an empty Pringles tub and some lollipop sticks...
The Jam Factory Knitters' tour to Shetland was a great success. The weather was astonishingly kind to us, so much so that my more southerly friends don't believe it is ever wet and windy up there... We stayed right in the centre of the capital Lerwick, next door to the fabulous Shetland Museum. We did suitably "knitty" type things from Lerwick and up on the West and North Mainland for the first few days, including a tour of the Museum, a visit to Jamieson's Woollen Mill and Shop and a visit to the delightful little museum at Tangwick Haa. Then on 1st June we headed off to Fair Isle. We had a rough but memorable trip on the ferry over the notorious bit of sea from Grutness but once we were there the climate was positively Mediterranean! We stayed on a croft with Kathy Coull who gave us the most wonderful time and introduced us to many of the other talented people there: knitters, spinners, musicians and makers of traditional spinning-wheels and straw-backed chairs. We had lessons in spinning and Fair Isle knitting in the round using a knitting belt - and the opportunity to gain a little insight into life in an isolated yet creatively stimulating environment. 
Because we often knit flat pieces,then sew them together, it can be easy to forget that knitting is a three-dimensional craft. I've been reminded a few times lately that when we knit we are creating yarn sculptures. I've just completed Module 5 of my City & Guilds course (hurrah!) and part of that has been to manipulate paper into 3-D shapes as a prelude to designing assessment pieces. I always struggled with the geometry aspects of maths at school and this has brought back memories of all that frustration. I once asked my maths teacher what use symmetry would be to me in the "real" world and he had no answer. If only he had mentioned textiles! 
Mathematics is also connected with weaving, which I finally tried out last week at the Oxford Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, inspired by my visit to the new Textile Gallery in the Ashmolean Museum. I was really pleased by the slight ikat effect I produced once I started using two colours on a rigid heddle loom ably taught by Angela Pawlyn. I'd like to do more. The Ashmolean display is a delight, too, if a little hard to find (just off the restaurant in the basement). It's so good to see all these lovely textiles on display, including Central Asian coats which drew my attention in an exhibition there over 15 years ago. The display includes this panel on Textiles and Mathematics: "Making textiles requires mathematical skills: both arithmetic and geometry are used to translate a pattern into a woven structure or textile surface design. The relationship of warp to weft creates the surface of the cloth, and the weaver learns to translate this into patterns...(these) may also require counting skills and sophisticated planning of space...Counted stitches are the basis of...embroidery and principles of symmetry are essential when designing printing with blocks." Now, why couldn't Mr Rogers have told me that?!!!
Good meeting of the Oxford Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers on Saturday with a talk from Jim Gaffney about Turkish Weaving - Colours of the Earth. It proved impossible to resist one of his natural-dyed woven kilims and it is now adorning my dining-room. I started a bit of a trend as two other kilims were also carried home by their happy owners. Sometimes it's necessary to succumb to beautiful objects... I read once that in Native American tradition there is no distinction between beauty and function: beauty arises from living in harmony with the order of the universe and a Navajo Night chant records how we are surrounded by beauty. That weaving is also a Navajo tradition doesn't seem a coincidence. And this harmony is also about trading fairly, and knowing that the kilim I now walk across each morning and evening has been made by Turkish women who are thus helped to preserve their traditions. Which is what this involvement in textiles is all about for me. Jim and his wife are going to be at Ally Pally in October so do check out their stall if you go.
I was up in Edinburgh last week and took some time out to visit a delightful exhibition at the Dovecot Gallery on Infirmary Street. Called Taking Time, it is all about slowing down to appreciate traditional crafts. There is really cool knitting wall where you can add your own yarn-related piece of art. So I knitted a piece of Shetland Lace and left some instructions for continuing it with the address of this blog. So, if you find it and add to the wall, do post a comment and let me know! You can see some more images of the wall here: |
| Edinburgh Knitting Wall |
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| Scarlet Knitting |
Feeling much better but it has taken a while. Didn't get back to work until the middle of the month and have definitely been pacing myself since. Jam Factory Knitters, I will come and see you again soon! There's a sense of time lost since that moment in the week before Christmas when I went under with my lurgy. For a while I just lay there and groaned and even when I began to feel better I still found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the TV. Now I'm having to wean myself big time off repeats of House and CSI. The evenings are lighter and it's time to come out of hibernation. And the time hasn't been completely lost, of course, because I have been knitting - cables for my course and a baby jacket for a work colleague who has just started her maternity leave. 
