It's amazing how time escapes you when you get busy. My last post was in August of 2021, and it's now a new year and a very different world. I'm not all that surprised by my absence - I started my first proper teaching job back in September and being a teacher certainly comes with a great burden of work, stress and burnout. That's not to say that I haven't been enjoying it. I've just been busy. Back in August, I was also living in a cute little flat with a nice balcony that provided perfect lighting for taking photos. Now that I've moved out, I've found it harder to take decent photos, but I think I've finally found a good setup thanks to a photography workshop with Julie Crawford of Knitted Bliss. Anyway, I shouldn't really be listing excuses, I'm sure you're not here for that. You're here to find out about what I've been knitting. So, let's get on to my current WIP list.
The Annecy Sweater
Back in May of 2021, I took a workshop with Unravel festival. It was a class by Karie Westermann on Knitting the Landscape, finding design inspiration from your surroundings. During the workshop, we explored somewhere that was meaningful to us and worked out how to represent that in knitting. At the end of the session, I went straight to a knitting chart website and charted out my first draft of the Annecy sweater, a design inspired by the Pont des Amours in Annecy, France. I was lucky enough to live in this alpine town for 5 months back in 2018. To this day, Annecy is still my favourite place in the world and holds many special memories.
The turquoise blue yarn, a basic acrylic from poundland that I bought as part of my emergency lockdown stockpile, represents the turquoise-blue waters of Lake Annecy. The white yarn represents snow settled on the bridge and the mountains beyond, and the grey replicates the bridge pattern itself. The basic sweater pattern is the highly detailed Strangebrew pattern from Tin Can Knits. I will admit, I didn't gauge swatch and ended up with a slightly bigger sweater than expected. It's my own fault, I've always assumed that I have a standard gauge but I've come to discover that my gauge is much looser than I expected. Nevertheless, I still like the sweater and I'm sure I'll continue to wear it over the coming months. If I make it again, I'll make sure to gauge swatch and I'll maybe use a darker contrast colour for the bridge pattern.
I've added my colourwork chart here for anyone that wants to try it. It fits nicely into the strangebrew pattern, which uses multiples of 24 stitches.
The Pont des Amours in Annecy, France
Westknits MKAL 2021 - Shawlography
Currently on my needles is Shawlography, Stephen West's mystery knitalong that started way back in October. I have completed the first section of the pattern, but the project was put on hold in the run up to Christmas as I prioritised more pressing gift knits. I've been a little distracted by some of my other WIPS lately, but I am hoping to get back to Shawlography soon as it's been a very enjoyable and satisfying knit so far. This is the first Stephen West pattern and the first shawl I have ever made, and I must say it's a fantastic learning curve. Stephen West's video tutorials are so in-depth and I've learned so many new techniques already. I've also signed up for Stephen West's workshops on colourwork, marling and now shawl design and I've been so impressed with their content - I'm a big fan!
I bought the yarn for this shawl at the Unravel Sweater Weather yarn show in Farnham. The dark blue and grey shades are a sock 4-ply by
Botanical Yarn, whereas the other shades are a beautiful alpaca silk 4-ply and merino silk 4-ply from
Ainsworth & Prin. I'll admit, it is the most I have ever spent on yarn as I tend to go cheaper, big brand yarns, but I wanted to properly treat myself to beautiful hand dyed yarn for once. The alpaca silk 4-ply is the softest yarn I have ever felt, and has such beautiful colourway names like
Sticky Toffee and
Barley Twist. I also love the colour palette I picked out - it was very appropriate for autumn, although it's not as in season now that we're heading into spring.
JoJo Rabbit Sweater
Last month, I came down with Covid. While I was isolating, I rewatched one of my favourite films in recent years - JoJo Rabbit. It's an intelligent blend of comedy and drama, focussing on JoJo Betzler, a young boy in the Hitler Youth who ignorantly idolises Hitler and the Nazi regime. One thing I really like about the film is the fashion - I absolutely love fashion from the 1930s-1950s, and the film, based in 1940s Germany, features plenty of wonderful vintage outfits. There is
one outfit in particular that many knitters have recreated themselves, which likely originates from the
Lavenda 915 pattern. I have started to make my own version, adapted to my measurements and for DK weight yarn. It's the first vintage pattern of many that I intend to knit, having purchased several vintage knitting books in recent months. Most of them are from Odhams and date between 1930 and 1950.
You might have noticed a hand-drawn illustration of a bird in some of the photos above. The note says "Wedding joys be thine - From Mabel - MBR". I found it inside one of the books I purchased from eBay, alongside a small clipping from a newspaper about love birds. From what I can tell, the note is authentic and must date from the late 1950s - early 1960s. The other side of the newspaper clipping talks about South Africa leaving the British Commonwealth, an event which occurred in 1961. I love finding old notes and annotations in books, especially ones that date from many years ago - the book itself was published in 1941 and must have had many different owners before ending up in my hands.
Swatching experiments
The last thing I've been knitting recently is a small swatch using two mustard-yellow yarns from my stash. Both, I believe, have been discontinued which means that whatever I make will be rather unique. The yarn on the left is a Trend Deluxe, a chunky yarn from SMC Select in the colourway Sun. The second lace-weight yarn is Hobbycraft's Head in the Clouds yarn in the shade Mustard. The two yarns look beautiful together, especially with the slight shimmer provided by the Trend Deluxe yarn. I experimented with a cable pattern on each side, but I think I will use the open eyelet cable that you can see in the picture. I'm currently thinking of using this stitch pattern in a cardigan, as I've not made many cardigans before. But who knows - I also have a fondness for chunky cable knit sweaters.
That's all for this month's WIPS and FOs. Now that I've got a little photography studio set up, I should hopefully be able to post a little more often. My objective for this year is to publish my first pattern, so hopefully there'll be some patterns coming your way soon.
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