A Welcome to Lennon

 Long time no blog post here but the latest baby to arrive has now received his Fair Isle jacket, which I really loved knitting. A huge welcome to him...

Knitting the Olympics

It's been a while since I wrote here and the reason is there hasn't been that much knitting going on until recently.  While some other knitters have been enthusiastically knitting the Olympics, yes, really, there are some woolly Olympics out there, I've just been slowly plodding on with pieces for my Denim Patchwork Throw for a while. Then along came my own Olympic challenge, which is the marathon baby knitting for my ever reproductive, now former, work colleagues. I was pleased with how this little cardigan turned out, using up Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino yarns from several projects with an alternating stripe pattern and pulling it together with some fabulous buttons. As I set out on  new work ventures, I am wishing all the mums and babies, born and unborn, well.

 

Having left that particular sport, I can now concentrate on piecing together that throw, with my eyes on the next trip up to the Shetland house next month for completion. There were more pieces than I thought once I laid them out although there are a few more to do. As you see, our adopted cat Dora has been helping as always. I've begun washing and shrinking the pieces and thinking about where they need to go and what is left to knit. Next comes the fun of playing with bleach and sandpaper to 'distress' the denim and see what effects I can produce. More soon.

Latest Projects

A delight to have completed a jacket to welcome the latest OIA baby. Pattern from Debbie Bliss's Baby Cashmerino book.

Time now to return to knitting a patchwork throw for the Shetland house. I'm using Rowan Denim and adapting patterns and techniques from Jane Gottelier's Indigo Knits.

Transformations and Shifts

I've had a long knitting break for a variety of reasons. Work commitments have been one thing (and I'm so very grateful to Kate MacDonald for taking on the Oxford Summer School for me - everyone really enjoyed the week). Alongside this has been a deeper discernment process, which has resulted in a big decision to drop my City and Guilds Hand Knitting course and to begin training as an interfaith minister later this year. From now on my main blog will be what I am calling my online commonplace book, with only occasional postings here. Do drop by and take a look. You can also find me on Twitter .

As part of my discernment around this, in June I went back to my old childhood "patch" in Bristol and the first picture here is the corrugated fence outside my primary school. I was struck by the beauty of its colours and patterns. It was fascinating to 'beat the bounds' of my walk to and from school and home, remembering how scary being a child there sometimes was and seeing as an adult how small the distances actually are. It has felt important to revisit the places that I came from before setting out on my new adventure.



In the meantime, I've picked up my knitting needles again, to create a patchwork throw for the Shetland house - I see that the colours of the fence are reflected there. I'm basing it on the Gwithian Beach Blanket in Jane Gottelier's delightful book Indigo Knits,using Rowan's wonderful denim cotton yarn and trying out some of the distressing and bleaching techniques. The transformations and shifts in the yarn occur not only as you knit the stitches, combining colours or twisting cables, but also as you apply bleach or sandpaper and as it shrinks to size in the washing-machine and afterwards continues to wear with use and age. Something about life, here, as always in knitting - change is at the heart of the universe. How exciting!

Playfulness

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood". I read this on a sign in an art gallery recently. It's one of those trite statements that you can easily dismiss - but chewing it over, I thought, "Hey, why not?". My own childhood had a deep fracture running through it and I've spent significant amounts of time discovering and understanding how that has affected me. Now this invitation has enabled me to look back at the particular glass of water that makes up my early years and see it as half-full rather than half-empty. Undoubtedly, two of my best growing up experiences were a vast amount of reading of all kinds, and spending time crafting with my grandmother.

Recreating playfulness with those two sticks of metal, wood or bamboo that we call knitting is definitely one way to reconnect to the happier parts of my childhood. And it's good to know that there will be an opportunity to share this playfulness at the Oxford Summer School 2011 - there are still a few spaces available on my New Directions in Knitting course.

Unblocking

My web browsing and other reading recently seems to have led me to lots of successful, productive artists of one kind or another - writers, knitters, designers. I mentioned feeling stuck last time and, although sometimes the success of others can be encouraging, at other times it can feel downright overwhelming and intimidating. I've definitely been in the latter place for a while. I've written about the double meaning of knitter's block before, so I thought this time it was worth celebrating those glorious times when one feels able to blast through something and unblock it. This is the story of my Quite Contrary Midwinter purse, finally pictured here. I had the idea for this ages ago at a Debbie Abrahams Design Workshop when Debbie miraculously produced a selection of Rowan Hand Knit Cotton yarn in exactly the right colours for my inspiration piece, a saucer designed by Jessie Tait for Midwinter in a pattern called Quite Contrary. We decided quite quickly that Fair Isle was the best technique to render the essence of the piece and I knitted a sample that day and did the calculations for the purse at the second part of her workshop (well worth doing if you are interested in designing your own knits Debbie Abrahams).

I finished the knitting part quite quickly after that. But I was then blocked for ages about how to line and attach the bag to its frame, kindly donated by my friend Margaret from a Simply Knitting free gift. It was not knitting, you see, and therefore difficult to do! Several times I made the attempt, reading instructions from different places and by different writers. I also tried various techniques to get unblocked, including an exercise from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, in which I am a great believer. However, nothing seemed to work, although the Cameron exercise did help me to see that it was my fear of failure that was keeping me stuck. But for eighteen months this project has languished in my "unfinished" basket, to be taken out at various intervals, another attempt tried, ripped out and put aside.

Finally it was a coaching session with Chrissie McGinn of Wisborough that helped me. Chrissie asked me whether I believed that I could finish the project - and I realised that I didn't. But that realisation somehow seemed to help me to shift it, so last Friday I simply sat down, sewed up the seams and attached the purse frame.

It sounds simple, so why couldn't I finish it before? It's hard to explain but I expect those of you who've been stuck like this will understand. Of course it isn't always just a case of mind over matter - there needs to be an understanding of technique and of what you need to do. But I came to realise that I already had that and that I was just afraid of making a mistake. It did take a few goes to get this to work and of course it is not perfect but it is finished and I am using it - hurrah! And the mystery of unblocking? Well, perhaps we will never fathom it fully. You might even call it Quite Contrary...

It's a long wait for Easter!

Struggling a bit with my creativity at the moment - torn between several options and not sure which way to take things. Shetland life seems a long way away, although I am going up at the end of May and I enjoyed encouraging other folks to go there, through my talk to the Oxford Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers on the 19 March. I think they will publish my presentation there at some point so do take a look. Meanwhile, isn't it a really long wait for Easter this year? Here are some Shetland sheep to look at in the meantime...