Making the Scout Shawl

Making the Scout Shawl

Hello and welcome to the first post of 2024. As I mentioned at the end of last year, we are in the middle of a big house move so things are a little in flux here, however, I have had a project on the go through all the stress of selling a house and it has been invaluable in helping to cope not just with this, but also the dark winter days that seem so short and damp and plagued with endless grey skies. The ‘Scout Shawl’ is a masterclass in practicing fairisle knitting.

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Making a fairisle cowl, Beatrix Potter at the V & A and a Cumbrian weekend

Making a fairisle cowl, Beatrix Potter at the V & A and a Cumbrian weekend

This post sounds all a bit of a mouthful…and it may turn out to be a bit of a ramble, but several things that began separately all seemed to conspire to form a whole rather lovely adventure.

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Creative Mending - a wool jumper and an embroidered patch

Creative Mending - a wool jumper and an embroidered patch

As part of my drive towards sustainable living, I have been wanting to attempt this for a while. There has been loads of inspirational images popping up on instagram and in the wider media about how to look at this, but it was buying, Flora Collingwood-Norris’ amazing book ‘Visible Creative Mending, that finally launched me on my way with it.

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Knitting a Capelet

Knitting a Capelet

If you are wondering what a ‘Capelet’ is (and I didn’t know at first) it’s a small cape that usually just covers the shoulders. They seem to have been quite popular in the 1920s and 30s. Over the last few years, poncho’s have been very popular and they do make sense, keeping you warm but allowing your arms freedom of movement. A capelet is much the same, but shorter and sort of somewhere in between a cowl and a poncho. Living in an old stone house in Yorkshire, I confess it can get quite chilly in winter and these are the perfect solution and they have such a vintage vibe too.

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Making a knitted nordic Christmas garland

Making a knitted nordic Christmas garland

Tiny knitted christmas trees adorned with pearl buttons and wooden stars….sounds like a dreamy little project doesn’t it. This is something I have been wanting to make for several years and somehow it always gets left too late and I am not organised with the right sort of wool and it gets relegated to the next year list yet again.

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Making fairisle arm warmers

Making fairisle arm warmers

This project has brought together threads from all sorts of unexpected and sometimes long forgotten thoughts. I am so keen to visit Fair isle now as well, all the Sottish Islands come to that. I rediscovered a beautiful book that I so enjoyed to read. From the very first page ‘Love for Lydia’ enchanted me with it’s gentle descriptive narrative of an english winter. It could have been here …. “Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice form the north-east…… It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain. Frost has begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. All the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods.”

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