Yarnwise 51 is out. There, you can read more about our weekend at Dove Cottage and what Wordsworth had to say about the old hand spinners and knitters of Westmorland.
There’s also a great article by Lou Butt of Lou Butt Designs, about the Nude Ewe – brilliant project promoting our native British sheep breeds and their wool. Also, a great (contemporary) design by fellow gansey designer, Janine Le Cras of Guernseygal Designs.
Busy time here. We’re about to visit a very special museum to document some knitted items and knitting artefacts from the 19thC – I can’t say where we’re going, just yet, but it is exciting.
The sample knits for reverse engineered 19thC gloves in the new edition of ‘Old Hand Knitters of the Dales’ – as well as the sample knitting for ‘River Ganseys‘ – are now well underway. We think we chose the most challenging pair of Dales gloves extant to reverse engineer – and when it came to it, got a bit more than we bargained for; as a result, the gloves are now a collaboration between three of us. (Unveiling my lovely collaborators in the near future. We were so lucky to get such experts to work with us on this!)
If you are interested in either or both books, join the mailing list at Cooperative Press, and you will be notified when they are ready for pre-order.
And finally…. nothing to do with knitting or history but a bit of Nature for you, as we’ve been all Wordsworthian… Saw my first ever red squirrel in Grasmere. He was too fast for our photographer, but… later in the day, he spotted this slow worm:
….leave
Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose; There let the vernal slow-worm sun himself, And let the redbreast hop from stone to stone
[From Wordsworth’s snappily titled “INSCRIPTIONS WRITTEN WITH A SLATE PENCIL UPON A STONE, THE LARGEST OF A HEAP LYING NEAR A DESERTED QUARRY, UPON ONE OF THE ISLANDS AT RYDAL, 1800″].
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 