Following my Blog

I have a new provider of the 'blog followers; service which you can access by the link at the top of the sidebar. Not all of my existing list of followers has yet been added to the new system though so, if you don't get an email when I publish a new post, you might like to re-follow me to make sure you don't miss any of my witterings!

Memories of Pat

 

Pat / Woolhelmina  by Pat's husband, Steve

As many of you in the knitting world will know, Pat Ashforth died a few weeks ago. Pat was a Mathematician, an inspiring knitting and crochet designer and a good friend to many. 

I've known Pat since I first bought her patterns by post many years ago and her work has continued to amaze me ever since - not to mention, making me a little envious. I once started a list of 'other people's patterns that I wish I'd thought of first', only to find that nearly all of them were Pat's. She managed to combine quirky, clever and colourful in every one and then rounded them off with a witty name. Just have a browse through her designs here and you'll see what I mean.

To me, Pat was a mentor. When I started designing, she was always there to encourage and help; I've lost count of the number of times she had to patiently talk me through the technicalities when I was new to ravelry. She was the one who suggested that we start a Frankie's Knitted Stuff ravelry group and would always step in to cover for me there if I was away or ill. People there will remember her sense of humour and her kindness to one and all.

We only met once, at a ravelry day in Coventry years ago - remember that? - but I feel that I have lost a good friend. I shall miss her.

Tomorrow I shall follow Pat's funeral service online. If  anyone else would like to do the same, here are the details:

The live feed for the service can be accessed at watch.obitus.com You will need these details to follow the service:

Username tema5825
Password 592014

The funeral is at 1.30 UK time; here is the time for other parts of the world:

5:30 am Pacific
8:30 am Eastern
12:30 UTC
14:30 Central Europe

There will also be a recording of the funeral, available after a few days.

If anyone would like to make a donation in memory of Pat, her family have asked for contributions to her Woolly Thoughts for Kidney Research fundraising page. Pat had a kidney transplant many years ago so this was a cause close to her heart.

It would be nice if her many friends and supporters around the world could come together to show the family just how much she meant to us all.

Buying in Bulk

You know how Wool Warehouse sends their yarn in organza bags? Am I the only one who is building up a collection of the huge size? I only seem to be able to order yarn in large quantities. This was the latest arrival.

Just a few things to be going on with.

Do you want to see what I got? First of all, here are the three new shades of Stylecraft Special DK which bring the total number up to 100.

From left to right they are Gingerbread, A Hint of Silver and Warm Grey. Not the most exciting of colours but I like to keep my stock up to date. If my Errand Boy ever gets round to doing my Hobbycraft shopping for me, I might have a use for the Gingerbread shade. One of the things on the list is more polystyrene wreaths in smaller sizes as I want to design a new Christmas wreath.

The next collection of yarn is also new, the complete range of King Cole Bramble DK which, luckily, only comes in six shades.

This is a colour changing yarn with what looks like a long colour run and I was very taken with the shades (and the names, obviously). My favourites are probably the three darker colours: Mixed Berries, Raspberry and Loganberry.

I think there are some interesting possibilities by pairing dark and light shades too though. Look at these two together, 

Loganberry and Haze.

I don't know what I'm going to do with these yet; I shall have to have a little play. What else did I get? Four balls of Stylecraft Special in Cream - not very exciting again but these are for the background to the crochet Butterfly Baby Blanket I'm working on.

The butterflies are going to be worked in a range of pretty colours - hence the colour pegs in the picture.

The last collection of yarn in my order was some Scheepjes Stone Washed in five colours to try out an idea for a patchwork blanket that I've had.

The idea is to knit large blocks, made up of different textured squares. I chose the colours from the squares I knitted with the Stone Washed colour pack and which have yet to be turned into anything. I wrote about this a while ago in a blog post called Cataloguing Colours.

Anyway, I'm designing one patch a day (there will be seven to a block) and this is what I've got so far.

I particularly like the stitch I've used for the cream patch. It's called Rosette Stitch and I found it in one of the Barbara Walker Treasuries. As she says, it looks rather like crochet and the other side is pretty too.

So, that's the lot. From that order anyway. No doubt I shall need some more before long.

In the Garden

My garden is currently a very soggy jungle as I'm waiting for the Ox-Eye Daisies to finish so that the grass can have its first cut of the year. When my daughter was here a few weeks ago, the sun shone bightly and we spent lots of time outdoors. 

Having invested in a new, corded hedge trimmer, she was the lucky person who got to try it out first (I resisted the temptation to shout "don't cut the lead!" continually as she worked). This is how my much overgrown hedge ended up.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake? She was all set to cut off the last bit of the top when she spotted a nest. There's a blackbird's nest just below the sticky up bit and there were chicks in it. Which would explain why these two were watching the hedge trimming so keenly.

This is Mrs Blackbird on the bay window just outside my bedroom window. You will see that I had the window open a bit; I thought that was a small enough gap to keep the cats in ... until I found Tolly halfway to the nest the next day. Luckily, he's a very obedient cat; I just had to say "Tolly!" in a stern voice for him to turn round and come back in. Here's Mr Blackbird anxiously watching the nest too.

Rose beat a hasty retreat indoors so that they could get back to their babies which they did at once. You can't really make it out in this photo but the nest was full of little fluffy nestlings.

They've fledged now so I think it's probably safe to finish cutting the hedge. I was very tempted to put up a sign saying "no, it's not an attempt at topiary" as it looks so daft.

Meanwhile, the cats have been making the most of the long grass in the back garden. Linnet has made herself a nest; you only see her when you get right next to it.

As she doesn't really approve of Tolly, he's not allowed to share her nest so he made his own.

There he is, curled up on a patch of old honeysuckle sticks which can hardly be comfortable. It gets worse though. Look at this ...

Yes, that's a stick poking him in the eye and yes, he's fast asleep. He really is the dimmest cat I've ever known.

While Rose was here we started the last of our seasonal cross stitch samplers. It's the first time that we've worked on them in the same place.

Mine is on the left and Rose's is the one on blue fabric.

Since then, we've both done lots more on our Summer Samplers. I'm enjoying working on this one much more than the Winter and Spring ones for some reason. I really like the colours and there's lots of variety. Here's what I've done so far ...

Rose is coming again next month so we'll be able to compare our progress then. Meanwhile, I've just bought a chart for another big cross stitch project - Jane's Joy by Carolyn Manning, one of a collection of designs inspired by the Dear Jane quilt. I'm not quite sure when I'm going to start this but I just couldn't resist it.

Knitted Boxes

I am very partial to geometric shapes so my latest knitting project, Square Nesting Boxes, was right up my street. A set of five nesting boxes, lined with plastic canvas so that they keep their shape.

As with most of my work now, this one ended up taking much longer than it should have done. I make lots more mistakes than I used to and it takes me a lot longer to realise where I'm going wrong. The tricky bit about designing a set of boxes like these is to adjust the height of each box so that, when they're all together, the tops are level. It took me a long, long time to realise that I had to trust the number patterns in my knitting, rather than the measurements.

There's a temptation to stick to the tension too rigidly, thinking that 'must' give you the size you want. This led to me having to completely re-knit the green box. Once I just followed the numbers, everything worked, even though normal knitting rules suggested it wouldn't.

Have I lost you? What I'm talking about is the difficulty of taming a flexible material - knitting - to make inflexible shapes. It dawned on me that, as long as the plastic canvas pieces were the right size and the knitting covered them, it didn't matter if the knitting had to stretch more or less, depending on the box. If you study the pattern, you'll see that the number of stitches for each size and the number of rows to be worked increase in a regular way. It all looks so simple but it took ages for the penny to drop.

Anyway, enough of that. Once I'd worked out how to get the sizes right, I enjoyed knitting these. I used a slipped stitch rib which is easily learnt and gives the boxes a nice touch of texture, as well as covering the plastic well.

It's nice, portable knitting that doesn't require too much concentration and completing each box is very satisfying. I chose the colours as I went along, following the order of the rainbow but picking shades that I thought would go well with the other boxes. As ever, I used Stylecraft Special DK for my boxes; the colours are Lipstick, Spice, Dandelion, Apple and Lapiz.

As normal, I had a lot of fun arranging the finished boxes for photos. Oh look, it's a leaning tower ...

You can use them as lids for each other too, although they make rather chunky lids. Still, this might be useful if you want to knit them as gift boxes.

They hold a surprising amount of crafty stuff which, of course, is what I shall use mine for.

I decided to call them 'Square Nesting Boxes', rather than just plain old 'Nesting Boxes' to leave my options open. I may try a rectangular set and, if I can get circles of 10 holes per inch plastic canvas, round ones. In the meantime, have fun with the pattern.

Spring Samplers

Another season, another cross stitch sampler. Rose and I have finished our Spring Samplers.

That's Rose's on the left on pale blue, 32 count linen; I used a darkish cream 16 count Aida. We both had a lot of trouble choosing fabric for this design as there were so many colours that needed to show up on it. I'm not quite sure how many different blues Rose tried but, suffice to say, she'll be cross stitching on blue for quite a while. I had to change the white and one of the yellows for brighter shades to get them to show up against the cream (it's paler than it looks in that picture) and, even then, I wasn't too sure about it.

We got there in the end though. As is traditional, Rose ran out of thread for the border - the same green that we both ran out of last time - and I had to rush to get mine done before the end of the three months we set ourselves for each sampler.

The saga of me trying to sign my sampler in a straight line also carries on. With the Autumn Sampler, I dropped down a line half way through. I thought I'd got it right last time but, looking at it again, the '2021' isn't in line with the rest. Let's hope it's third time lucky. What do you think? Is it straight this time?

Would you like a closer look at my Spring Sampelr? This design is bursting with colour and full of little details.

Rabbits, birds and lots of flowers; those little purple ones remind me of Heart's Ease, the wild pansy and I had marmalade colour tulips like that in my garden this Spring. I thought the rain clouds and umbrellas were particularly apt as it rained throughout May here (which means my garden is now officially a jungle for cats again.

There are also sheep scattered here and there in the scene; my favourite is the one balanced on top of a hill, all on his own.

Here are my first three samplers all together. Don't they look good?

We're all ready to start our Summer Samplers now. Rose is coming to visit me next weekend - I can't wait! - so we're looking forward to being able to work on them together. 

I have to say, I'm quite relieved that I don't have to finish this one in three months. As it's the last in the series, it only has to be done in time to hang it up next year. While Rose is here we're planning to choose and order our sets of frames so that we're all set to hang the Autumn ones up at the start of September.

Lazy Crochet

After dealing with the complexities of the Primrose Garden blanket, I felt the need to do some simple crochet. This is what I came up with ...

This is the v stitch pattern, normally worked in one row stripes. Isn't it pretty? Now, I don't normally mind sewing in lots of ends with crochet but it struck me that there'd be an awful lot of ends on a scarf. So, I put my mind to working out how to avoid them and came up with my lazy crochet technique. Basically, you work two rows in the same direction, one in each colour, before turning the work and crocheting the next two rows. I used a plain colour for my main yarn and a variegated for the contrast but, even if you changed the contrast colour every row, you'd still have cut down the number of ends by half.

First of all I knitted this scarf, using navy DK weight yarn and some Lion Brand Mandala in a shade called Gnome. This is made up of eye-wateringly bright colours which I wasn't that keen on but pairing them with the dark blue has toned them down nicely.

The finished scarf is edged with a simple border in the main colour which evens up the sides. You can download the pattern from ravelry as normal. Lazy Vee Scarf.

It didn't take long to crochet this scarf so I then thought I'd try a completely different colourway, using the same technique to make a blanket.

I used a bigger hook for this project so the fabric has a softer drape. The two yarns I used were both from Stylecraft: Cream Batik for the main colour and Rainbow Batik Swirl for the contrast. I think these colours give the blanket a soft, vintage feel.

The blanket has a slightly more elaborate border than the scarf which you may or may not be able to see in this picture.

The blanket is called Lazy Vee Blanket and can be found next to the scarf pattern in my Ravelry Shop - two patterns for the price of one (if you can say that when both patterns are free.

I keep hard copies of all my patterns and these two finish off the 15th file. That's not counting all the big pattern series which have their own files.

The fifteen pattern files are on the lower shelf; above them are all the big series and, at one end, my collection of pattern notebooks. My daughter is hoping to be able to visit me for a few days next month and I'm going to pick her Archivist brain about how to organise those notebooks. They are full of incomprehensible scribblings and random pieces of loose paper which only mean something to me (and not even that sometimes) so I'd like to sort them out a bit.

According to ravelry, I have published 549 patterns in the last thirteen years or so. Blimey - how did that happen?