French Treats Knitting Holiday Year 2

I'm back in France for a second year teaching on the French Treats Knitting holiday. We all arrived at various times yesterday. It is a smaller group this year but as usuual a very nice group of ladies.

It was a bit grey this morning first thing but the weather has been very dry out here in France since February. It brightened up a bit later.

After breakfast everyone got settled in in the workroom to start the week. After introductions Sasha and I covered knitting Intarsia with the weaving in techniques i.e. carrying the background colour across the back of the motif. We also spent a bit of the morning rewinding the skeins of John Arbon Knitting by Numbers yarn that was sent out to use during the week.

It is a very nice yarn to knit with but comes in 100gm skeins so they needed to be re-wound into a number of small balls for everyone to have as wide a choice of colours as possible.

After lunch and a few spots of rain the knitters went for a walk to look for wild flowers, grasses etc to work from for the design workshop this afternoon.

As you can see from this last photo the fields around 'Le Vieux' are very dry but everyone found something to work with and take back for the afternoon workshop. I've left them busy drawing motifs with Sasha. I'm off to have a bit of a break and do some knitting by the pool while they all work!!



Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 3

I am teaching at Le Vieux Monastere again this year in June and September. On the June holiday I will be teaching alongside Sasha Kegan and this year we are working on 'Designing from Nature'. I am specifically covering Cables and Embellishments as well as helping in the general design workshop. The design work I have shown has been developed with this year's holiday in mind.

In this last group of pictures from my sketchbook I was working from photos of the pillars and ceiling in the cloisters at the Abbey with the idea of developing these into cable type patterns.

One of the ladies on the holiday kindly sent me this and another photo as I didn't take any photos of the pillars myself.

PhotoShop can be a very useful tools when developing design work. I used a filter on the photo shown on the previous page to just show the edges giving an image that looks very like a pencil drawing. I'm not that good at drawing so I then traced over this printed image to produce the image below it on the other page. Doing this tracing gave me a better understanding of how the arches fit together.

I then isolated and traced some lines which I used to produce the drawings on these 2 pages.

I did some more work with tracing the arches along similar lines to the picture opposite (a line edge print of another photo in the cloisters) I am now playing around with how to translate these arches into knitted cables - more samples to come.

I did also take photos of an old tree at the Abbey and this is a close up image of the tree bark which I thought might work well as a knit and purl pattern.

so there is plenty of work for me to be getting on with!!

Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 2

This second group of design work is based on some of the flowers at the 'Abbey' we visited on the Sunday. I took some close up shots of flowers in a pot. I'm not a gardener so I don't know what they are called but I liked the colours. Each flower is fairly simple to draw as the petals are quite open and each flower has 5 petals.

On this page from my sketchbook I am showing a cropped picture of the flowers, a watercolour drawing and a couple of coloured pencil drawings of groups of flowers. I will trace some of these images onto stitch related graph paper so I can knit or Swiss darn the flowers. When I have made some samples I will upload the images.

As well as drawing from the photo of the flowers I also used it as a colour source for yarn wrappings as shown in the picture below.

The yarn wrapping at the top left has been worked using a mix of yarns from my stash. The yarn wrapping at top right has been worked using the Knitting By Numbers yarn. In the second wrapping I added more green to the wrapping as there is quite a lot of green in the picture. The wrapping at the bottom is still using the same KBN yarn colours but rather than working the stripes based on the colour proportions in the picture I have wrapped stripes based on a random stripes generator.

The yarn wrappings on this 3rd page are also based on the random stripes generator but using the same range of yarn colours from KBN. The random stripes generator I used is from the website http://www.biscuitsandjam.com/index.php or you can try googling random stripes generator. You can select as many colours as you want from their grid of colours and also select the widths of various stripes e.g. using the Fibonacci sequence and then press the go button. If you don't like the combination offered you can press the refresh button to get a new selection. It is very addictive and you can spend hours playing with the colour sequences!!

As I said I'll post some samples once they have been knitted.

Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 1

Last June I was invited to teach on the French Treats Knitting Holiday at Le Vieux Monastere. While there I took quite a few photographs, but I have only just recently got around to doing some drawing from these photos. I've looked at several different aspects so I will post each group of pictures together in several posts.

The property is in the middle of fields so when we were waiting to get into the buses for an excursion on one of the days I took some photos of the poppies and wild flowers at the edge of the field. Below is a closeup print of one of the photos with a colour pencil drawing opposite it.

 I made several drawings using similar pictures.

On this next page I used watercolours rather than pencils and I also made a yarn wrapping trying to match the colours in the photo. The yarns used for the yarn wrapping are 'Knitting By Numbers' 100% merino wool DK from Fibre Harvest. It is a very nice yarn to work with and each colour comes in a range of tones from light to dark. Although I haven't included the wild flowers on the right of the photo in my watercolour drawing I have included their colour in the yarn wrapping.

While making these drawings I realised that I was particularly interested in the plant stems and seed heads of the poppies and how they cross over each other.

On this last page I have concentrated on drawing the poppy seed heads and stems rather than the flowers. I can see these drawings being worked in a raised twisted knit stitch on a purl background and the seed heads as a cluster stitch.

When I have knitted up some samples I will post the images of the knitted samples.

Designs for French Treats Holiday

I was asked to teach 2 specific workshops on the French Treats holiday, one on lace knitting and one on knitting with beads. We agreed to use the yarn from Fibre Harvest/John Arbon Textiles so I visited their stand at the Unravel Show in Farnham in February. They spin a variety of yarns including a number of Alpaca and Alpaca mix yarns.

For the workshops I felt it would be a good idea to design a couple of project that could be started on the holiday and completed at home. Lace knitting using fine lace eight yarn has become quite popular so I decided I would use the UK Alpaca Superfine 2/12nm 3ply yarn for the projects I would design. This 90% alpaca yarn from Fibre Harvest comes in a small selection of colours.

I designed the scarf first. It uses 2 lace patterns, one called diamonds and the other called pillars. The pillars pattern is an extension of the diamond pattern so they are linked. The scarf I knitted uses both patterns but you could knit it in one or other pattern throughout.

The diamond pattern

The pillars pattern.

This alpaca yarn comes in a 100gm skein so there was plenty of yarn to make the scarf and a pair of beaded mittens. The scarf I knitted took about 45gms of yarn.

The other workshop I taught was beaded knitting so I designed these mittens. I ended up making 2 versions, one using one strand of yarn and the other using 2 strands of the lace weight yarn. They are both knitted to the same pattern but the single strand mitten comes out finer and a bit smaller than the 2 strand version.

The single strand version need to be knitted on 2.5mm needles and as the knitters attending the holiday had not been told to bring such small needles I designed the 2 strand version to be knitted on 3mm needles.

The picture above is the 2 strand version of the mitten and the picture blow is the single strand version. I also used a picot cast on to make the mitten look more decorative and in the single strand version I used a picot cast off as well.

From the feedback I go both designs were very well received by those attending the holiday even though they would have to complete both projects at home.

More from French Treats

I've been very busy recently so have only just got around to uploading the rest of the photos from France. Wednesday morning was a workshop on knitted and crocheted flowers with Sasha.


In the afternoon we had an impromptu workshop on spinning using drop spindles provided by Sandra who is a spinner and lives near Le Veiux Monastere. There was some alpaca/blue faced Leicester tops included in the goody bags, hence the spinning workshop.

That evening we all went out to a lovely restaurant in the local town for a very good meal. The divers took a group photo for us.

Thursday morning was my workshop on beaded knitting. I designed a mitten as the project to make which could be made with the same yarn as I used for the lace scarf project. There was plenty of yarn to complete both projects from the one skein of yarn.

You can see some of the beaded knitted samples I brought with me.

In the afternoon we went to the Roman town of Sainte for a look around and to visit a couple of yarn shops. There was a small yarn shop in town which didn't have a big selection but did have some interesting yarn. It also had a great selection of buttons although some were very pricey.

The other yarn shop was out of town so we took a detour on our way back to visit this shop. It had a wide range of basic yarn, mainly Berge de France which did include their new Origins range. There weren't any specialist or hand dyed yarns but the French do seem to stick to fairly basic yarns.


Friday was our last full day. After chatting with everyone on the previous evening we changed the Friday workshop to being a 'design a garment to incorporate what you have learnt this week' This workshop went very well and rounded of the week as everyone was able to go away with an idea of something they could make once they got home.

We continued the design workshop after lunch and then towards the end of the afternoon we asked everyone to pin up what they had done over the week. It is always great to see what everyone has done and to realise we did cover quite a bit.

These photos show quite a bit of the work completed by everyone over the holiday.

It was a very enjoyable week of teaching. The ladies who attended the week made it a very enjoyable and fun week.

I have been invited to teach on the French Treats Holiday in June next year so put 4th June 2011 in your diaries as the date of the next holiday.

French Treats Day 3 and 4

Monday was a busy day with knitting workshops in the morning and afternoon. Sasha started off the day with a workshop on Pockets and Pleats and in the afternoon I taught a workshop on Lace knitting with a straight scarf pattern.

The workshops went well with several people continuing to work on their pieces in the evening but most just relaxing after a long but enjoyable day.

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On Tuesday we had a 'day off'. People could continue with their projects from the day before in the morning and then at 11.30 we met at the buses for an excursion to Mornac sur Seudre, a fishing and artisan village south of La Rochelle near the Ile D'Oleron. We arrived about 12.30 to 1.00 and had lunch in a very nice restaurant (the middle building in the picture below)

After lunch we had a wonder around the village. It was very picturesque, lots of photo opportunities and inspiration. The shops didn't open till after 3.00pm so we spent most of the time looking around.

There where some lovely hollyhocks growing by various buildings

Looking at the angel of some of the pillars it was amazing the old market place was still standing!

Some of the pieces in one of the art shops.

and a very pretty passion flower.

Some members of the group were tempted to buy cloths and other bits and pieces but I just settled for a coffee and crepe before returning to the bus at about 4.30.

French Treats Day 2

Sunday started with the first workshop, a joint workshop with 'Face cloths' as the theme. A number of different textured stitches were offered and the students started to work on the stitch pattern they preferred.


Later in the morning students where asked to choose the yarn colour and beads for the lace and mittens project. The yarn for these 2 projects was one skein of lace weight alpaca yarn from Coldharbour Mills in Devon so this meant the skein needed to be re-wound. The tutors then found their true calling acting as skein swifts!!

After lunch we were taken on a trip to The Abbey of Fontdouce (Gentle Fountain) to look around and possibly find some design inspiration. There was also a music festival going on at the Abbey and during the afternoon a local chamber choir was singing at various places around the Abbey.

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The Abbey was built in the 11th or 12th century as a monastery for Benediction monks. At one point it became a Royal Abbey but much of it was destroyed during the Wars of Religion and again during the French Revolution. It stopped being a religious centre a couple of centuries ago and became a private residence. It is still a private residence but they are trying to restore some of the old parts.

The Abbey was well known for its garden, a formally laid out garden but there weren't many flowers in bloom when we visited but I did manage to find some interesting flowers and images. When we got back to Le Vieux Monastere I also took some pictures of the poppies in the field by the property.