useful daughter

It was really nice to see Claire at the weekend, not only because I'm blessed with a beautiful daughter(... and three rather handsome sons... ) but because she is a willing model. So here are some photos of the cowl made from the knitting in the previous post. I was going to make it into a scarf but ran out of two of the yarns I had used to make up the colours,
It is possibly a bit wide, but I had to finish on a pattern repeat to create a circle. I really like it, I like the nice , soft colours, and really like the stitch pattern and the fact that it has two distinct patterns therefore making the cowl reversible. The hand spun merino (from Handpaintedyarn.com) is lovely soft and cosy, and more importantly... not itchy!!

Whilst she was here I also used her to model something I had intended for myself.

We are away on Thurs, on our now annual tour around the UK. Mat is playing at Towersey Folk festival and then we set off with the caravan. This time we are going to tour around Snowdonia and Angelsey. We went to that region briefly last year and loved it so thought that we would go back and spend some time there. So this is the last post until the end of September when we return.


Back to the knitting... I thought I would make myself a shawl to wrap up in during the festival, and also trial a pattern before I committed some rather lovely pure cashmere to it. I decided to use a pattern from the book Folk Shawls. I choose the North Sea Shawl and used some wool and silk I had (on cone). I made no changes and just knitted the pattern as written. There are several changes I will make before I knit with the cashmere.. I will add border stitches as the lace patterns right to the very edge stitch. The transition lace is a bit weak,the look of it needs strengthening and the central pattern, across the back and shoulders, needs to be knit in two parts and grafted to create a symmetrical look. Having said that the shawl was attractive when knitted as is and would have been lovely except for one thing... after washing the yarn became very itchy.


As you can see she did sterling work, and only cost the price of a roast dinner!!... Oh and the shawl,.... it went home with her as she doesn't find the wool at all itchy. Thank you Claire.