Saturday 18 September 2010

Just Catching up

I suddenly seem to have got very busy again. The autumn is always pretty busy as the weather is not so nice for being in the garden and knitters get back to their knitting.

I have been booked to teach quite a few workshops and give talks on both hand and machine knitting over the next few months. If anyone is interested in where I'm teaching there is a full list on my website. In fact today I'm off to Birmingham to teach a workshop on Patchwork/Domino knitting to the Middland Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers. I'm sure it will be a good day as I always enjoy teaching the Patchwork knitting workshops; everyone's work is so different!

After a 2 month break over the summer we are also back to filming for Knit1.TV. This last week I filmed two demos of knitting Christmas Decorations. I know its only September but I'm teaching a workshop on Christmas Knitting at the InterKnit Cafe in Farnham at the beginning of October so I thought I would film knitting a couple of the samples I've designed for the workshops. When the films are up the patterns for the 2 samples - a knitted bauble and a knitted angel - will be available to download from the Knit1.TV website.

That's it for now as I need to go to Birmingham now!!

Tuesday 7 September 2010

Doing some machine knitting

I'm a member of the Guild of Machine Knitters as well as the Knitting and Crochet Guild and the Weavers Spinners and Dyers Online Guild. Having been a member of the WSD Online Guild for several years I've run a couple of knitting workshops for them so I suggested doing the same for the Guild of Machine Knitters.

So this month I am running the first machine knitting workshop for the Guild. The choice of subject was left to me so I decided to take this opportunity to explore one punchcard and knit it in as many variations as I can think of. I've started with Fair Isle as this is the stitch pattern most people use on their machines. I posted the first few files on the Yahoo groups website last week.

I've been busy knitting tuck stitch and slip stitch samples over the last few days, trying lost of variations with solid colours and with 2 or more colours. I've still got to write up the notes so i better get back to work as I'll need to upload these files later this week, but its been good to do some machine knitting again even if it is only samples!!