Skip to main content

I'm back!

Unlike my last big trip, this one was full of fibre highlights. The weather in Dublin was shocking - it was colder than in Melbourne, so I bought myself some laceweight and went and had a beer.
The we went to Portugal, where they sell yarn by weight - unlabelled, but lovely, and super, super cheap. I bought nearly a kilogram of yarn for a jumper for Leon. I ended up posting that back sea mail, which is good because I did quite a lot of shopping later on. I wanted to get a picture of the yarn shop there, but they didn't speak English, and were not overly friendly, so I thought I had better not.
I met up with Jen  in London and she took me on a yarn crawl. It was lovely to see her, and the yarn shops were amazing.

Then I went to Cockermouth and met up with Nicola and her sister Rachel , whose blog I read. It was amazing to see Nicola and so nice to meet Rachel in real life, although I feel like I sort of know her already. Woolfest was amazing. There were some sheep there, but it was more about all the amazing yarn.  So much prettiness! I bought two jumpers worth of British breeds Aran and quite a lot of hand dyed lace and sock weight.

 












O
One highlight was meeting Kate Davies, who is not just a talented designer, but so lovely as well.
Seeing her sample garments made me want to knit everything she has every designed, starting with Warriston, which I did buy the yarn for. 
We spend four days in the Lake district and there were sheep EVERYWHERE. I don't know what breed most of them were, but there was a large variety. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the lovely knitting I did while I was away, but right now I need to go unpack.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Sonia29 June, 2012

    Oh my, you have a photo of yourself with Nicola and Kate Davies! How awesome! It looks like you had a great trip, looking forward to catching up

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous30 June, 2012

    Did I mention how much I loved seeing you? Please come back soon :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous30 June, 2012

    What a wonderful trip! Meeting Kate Davies, I am so jealous. Those sheep in the picture are Herdwicks. I can't wait to see your holiday yarn. Welcome back.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unravelled wednesday and WAYRN - the one where I prepare

We are heading off for some camping and hiking and general R&R on Friday, so I'm currently in planning and preparing mode. Of course that mainly means deciding what to knit - I'm going to make the Old Romance cardigan by Joji Locatelli. The yarn is wound and I'm ready to go. I completed Leon's Winter Set (2023) just in time, and it's currently blocking. I'm reading Georgette Hayer's Fredrica , which I am enjoying very much. Regency romance is so sweet and, unlike current romance offerings, I know it won't suddenly tumble into gynaecological territory!  For unexplained reasons, NetGalley is offering some Georgette Heyer books at the moment - (maybe it's re-release?) and I'm taking this opportunity to read a few more of them And that's my week in knitting and reading.  To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as  Sharondoublekni t and on GoodReads as  Sharondblk .  I'm joining in with Kat ...
2 comments
Read more

Yarnalong - the one with the final bit of transport

Remember how I took every form of transport known to man a fortnight ago? Well, I was missing just one thing, suburban trains. But today I got to remedy that, knitting my way to Dandenong for work. Yay? My Char jumper has been knitting up ridiculously fast. It's easy, pleasant and a well written pattern. I'm reading Rachael Herron's latest book The Ones Who Matter Most . It's a good read so far, family centered fiction, easy to read but still emotionally challenging. I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's Men At Arms . I'm enjoying it, I didn't really know what to expect, but some of it reminds me of Catch 22, in that it catalogues the absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The narrator has the perfect upper crust English accent and I'm very pleased it's the first of a trilogy.   And that's another week of reading, knitting and catching trains everywhere for me. Do pop along to Ginny's blog to see what she and the rest of the yarnalong ...
3 comments
Read more

Why Andrea Mowry, why? (A rant and a rather nice finished object)

As mentioned, prior to our hiking trip I suddenly, and rather randomly, decided to knit  Andrea Morwy's Traveler Shell . It's basically an open fronted rectangle in a knit purl pattern. The pattern is FOURTEEN pages long. Why is the pattern 14 pages long? Because, instead of explaining the ten row repeat and then putting the shaping on top of that (e.g. decrease while continuing to knit in pattern), she writes out the entire ten row knit purl sequence every time something changes. Additionally, most of the time she starts with even number being the right side and wrong numbers being the right side,which is just plain odd. It's confusing and it's like she wants to keep you looking at the pattern for every row, rathe than following the very intuitive stitch pattern, which I had memorised after one repeat.  The instructions for the band just say 'pick up x number of stitches'. No ratios, no acjnowledgement that different bits of the band have different ratios. Afte...
1 comment
Read more