Mandy Moore's Blog, page 33

WWW: Profile of Kate Davies, Knitting with Cats, Journalist commits terrible yarn-related puns

Wonderful profile of designer Kate Davies, who talks about her own journey from academic to the world of knitting, with the matter of small bump in the road: a serious stroke that left her hospitalized and in recovery for many long months.

Love this: a knitter takes her craft with her as she travels around the world, leaving traces of her craft wherever she goes. In this blog post, she talks about her journey to becoming a ‘craftivist’, and her actual journeys. She speaks of ‘the great communicative potential of street art and the inherently inoffensive nature of craft and knitting’.

Members of the ‘Oxford Drunken Knitwits’ club.

Speaking of yarnbombing, I really like this display of over 1500 handknit and crocheted flowers that has been installed around The Radcliffe Camera, a beautiful building on the Oxford University campus

File under: not sure we should encourage this sort of nonsense. The subhead of this article about an office knitting group has not one but two terrible puns. Boo to puns!

A cat cafe in Manchester, UK, as launched a series of event evenings, offering yoga sessions, film nights and craft gatherings. Having a knit-night in a yarn shop or pub is so last year… let’s meet in a cat cafe! (I am not poking fun! I would be all over this! And I know a few others who would be, too.)

Here, There and Everywhere

 

Yarnitecture

 

I’ve heard that my new book has landed in the publisher’s warehouse early. Let me know when you get your copy and what you think about it. I’m equal parts nervous and excited to hear what everyone thinks!

 

While most of the staff was at Convergence Amy Greeman and I snuck into the WEBS Podcast, Ready, Set, Knit and talked about my book. Did you hear us? You can listen anytime here.

 

 

Spin singles with me

 

 

Are you interested in spinning singles to knit? I have a new video out this week from Interweave called Spinning Singles. It’s under and hour and full of tips on how to spin a stable, consistent singles yarn. And  of course I talk about manipulating color in singles yarns, too. I can’t help it, really. It’s available as a download now, with the DVD coming soon.

 

 

 

Because I have to do what everyone else is doing, I’ve dusted off my spindles. My family is going camping for a few days next week, where cell phones don’t work (I’m so excited). I will be the one spinning on a spindle in a hammock. We picked our campsite based on the number of trees for hammock hanging. So think of me here, spinning.

Camping time!

What are you spinning as summer winds down?

First Fall Issue WIPs and FOs

I know that many of us seem to be living in a heatwave at the moment – at least those of us in the Northern Hemisphere – but it hasn’t stopped the knitting.

Battie is thinking about fall, having turned the Prettified Thrash socks in a pair of very cool fingerless mitts:

 

The original Pyropa was worked in a gradient yarn, and it’s an excellent use of these fun yarns, but NotKnittingKnots took the project another way, and used two solids. It’s just as effective, in a totally different way.

I must also confess that I love a good blocking-in-progress shot!

The Ennui shawl is also inspiring some terrific color combinations:

Heno’s red-hot one

And Lorinne’s excellent use of a variegated yarn make it gorgeous in a very different way.

 

And definitely thinking about cold weather, TheBlueSquare has hot a lot of fun with Toketee gloves. Love the colour detail at the cuff.

 

 

 

 

WWW: On Creativity, *Very* Deep Stash, Tink

Very excited about this. Ravelry has added a new attribute for yarn information: source.

Yarnies: have you updated the attributes (new feature alert!) for your yarns on Ravelry yet? See how to do so here: https://t.co/OFcOZvaxOp

— Ravelry Pro (@RavelryPro) August 1, 2016

They’ve actually added a whole load of new attributes, but in particular we’re happy to see a place to add information about the source of fiber — where it was scoured, milled and dyed — and on its sustainability — whether it’s fair-trade, organic or recycled. Many thanks to the team of Ravelry who are always listening and always improving!

Photos taken by and copyright Kevin Horan, from the Washington Post.

Speaking of sources of fibers, enjoy these magnificent portraits of sheep and goats, taken by photographer Kevin Horan.

Designer Karie Westermann writes on her blog about creativity. In particular she addresses a question that I think many of us ask: I am really creative but things never look like they are supposed to. What am I doing wrong?

Deep stash. Very deep.

You think you’ve got old stuff at the bottom of your stash? This 3,000-year old ball of yarn, found at an archaeological dig in the U.K., is older than anything you’ve got, I promise.

(To call it ‘yarn’ isn’t entirely correct – this post on the Must Farm website describes it in more detail, using more accurate term ‘thread’.)

To quote from the Oxford English Dictionary blog: newly enshrined word tink is “an example of the linguistic inventiveness of knitting”. See, we’re not just creative with sticks and string, we’re creative with words, too!

Not strictly knitting, but I love this: textiles printed directly from sewer (yes, for once, I do mean sewer, not a person that sews :-)) covers.

Spinning and Knitting PSA : Rhinebeck

There are 73 days until Rhinebeck!

Is that enough time to spin and knit a sweater? Even if I have other work to do, lots of work, including other spinning and knitting?

I’m considering this handspun classic – Amy King’s Less is More

Less is More – Is there time?

I don’t have yarn spun to make it, I checked. If I make the short sleeved version, that’s about a pound and a half of fiber to spin. This is what I will be deeply mulling over the next few days and tossing my stash . I could make it out of singles or fatter yarn or with less ease to cut time. Or maybe I should make something smaller. But I feel like making something!  Are you spinning and knitting something for Rhinebeck this year?

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WWW: Knitting TV comes to Netflix! Knitted Yellow Jersey for bike ride winner! Sheep-shearing record broken!

Image courtesy the artist and The Yarn Loop website.

Amazing: a hand-knit portrait of Amy Winehouse, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of her death. Artist Lisa Bentman spent six weeks on the knitting, and then another week applying a sequin embellishment. You can learn more about the project in Lisa’s video diary. The FO is being raffled off for charity.

SlowTV comes to US Netflix! Overjoyed to learn that

Knitting at Diagon Alley

Diagon Alley!

A bonus of having a kiddo that does a traveling sport is sometimes you get to go to very cool places. My daughter competed in the AAU Springboard Diving Nations last week in Orlando, Florida. We are huge Harry Potter Fans, so in the few hours before our plane left we went to Diagon Alley at Harry Potter World in Universal Studios. I was giddy with the knitting.

 

Harry and Ron’s Sweaters

 

I saw the Harry and Ron sweaters for sale. These were acrylic, but they did a good job of looking like they were knit from Rowan’s Felted Tweed.

 

 

Yarn Shop!

 

There is a a yarn shop! Spindlewarps sadly is a display shop not a shopping shop (just like the bookstore Flourish and Blotts), but can you imagine if it were open for shopping? I stood in front of the window filling it with inventory in my mind for a long time. Even if they just sold kits, it would be fantastic!

 

 

What I bought

 

We had frozen Butterbeer, rode the Escape from Gringotts ride and shopped a little. I bought Molly Weasley’s wand and a Time Turner because  crafters always wish we had more time.

 

 

 

Our favorite thing was sitting a watching people. Everyone is so happy and excited to see everything and all of the other fans. It was a great way to recover from the stress of a big meet. I’ll leave you with a little video of Molly’s magical knitting needles, something I really wish I had!

 

 

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WWW: More Sheep-cams, “Farm to Needle”, Autumn Events

Mason Dixon Knitting brings to our attention a Norwegian Tourism promotion, which involves attaching cameras to sheep and exploring the country from a sheep’s point of view.  (And in case you’re wondering, I will never stop reporting on sheep-cams. I think they are wonderful.)

If you’re in London or environs, there’s lots of fun things going on this autumn. There’s the Great London Yarn Crawl on September 10th, and there’s the Yarnporium fair November 5 & 6th.

And staying in the UK for a moment, we were very happy to discover Woolsack, a website dedicated to promoting British wool products. In their own words, the website is intended to be

a ‘reference library’ listing and linking to everything and anything to do with British wool and British wool products from raw fleeces through to finished items & fashion garments, from local events to permanent exhibitions.

If you’re in Ontario, mark your calendar for September 10th, too: it’s the Kitchener Waterloo Knitter’s Fair.

We received a press release recently from Black Wolf Ranch alpaca farm, promoting their approach to what they term the “ranch to knitting” trend. They’re entirely correct, this movement is closely related to the “farm to table” approach in dining, and we embrace all these initiatives to make crafters more aware of the source of the materials they are working with, and how the materials were treated and processed all the way through the ‘lifecycle’. The emphasis on local products and sustainability is good for all of us. Any farm website that lists “About Our Animals and People” – in that order – is good in my books!

Cheeky: A nice review of my Pattern Writing Book, and if you read to the end there might be an opportunity to win a copy. Just saying.

Spindles Are Everywhere!

Akerworks Mini Spindles

Is it my imagination or are people spinning on spindles more right now?

I don’t know if it’s because of summer and they are portable, but I have seen more spindle spinning around in person and on social media.

I’ve heard rumors that there are fewer spinners now, that the spinning trend is leveling off and maybe dropping. The rumor is that spinners are turning to weaving and sewing and not spinning, not buying fiber or wheels.

I know spinners aren’t going anywhere and that this is part of the ongoing rhythm of fiber crafts in general. I also think that spinners are turning to spindles again. We are spinning on all spindles, but I have seen a crazy amount of spinning on Turkish spindles. I’ve also seen more spindle classes being offered at fiber shows and retreats.

Am I imagining things? Are you spindle spinning more?

Obsession Thursday: Finally knitting again!

Finally! Progress on my After the Rain in Rowan Revive.

The saga is coming to a close, at least for my right hand. (Catch up with the story here.)

It’s been 4 months since my surgery. I’ve tried to knit during the healing process, but haven’t found it very enjoyable. Which worried me.

Last week, I went on a road trip with a friend, and got to sit in the passenger seat for the first time in a while (being single means you’re the one driving all the time). I started to knit. It ached as the muscles aren’t even vaguely as strong as they used to be (or NEED to be), but I kept at it, with little breaks. In a while, I noticed it was less achy. And then it was easy.

What was the difference? Keeping at it? No. Up till now, I’d been continuing to try to knit combination, which is still new for me. On the road trip, I switched back to my autonomic knitting style: throwing. And poof, my mojo is returning.

I left the knitting down for the last week, and, picking it up again, it’s kind of like starting over. I used to knit every time I sat down to watch TV. With the pain I had, I broke that habit, and now I have to retrain myself.

This will be fun.