Cross country knitting

A rather wonderful weekend in Devon with precious friends and a new baby meant that I have spent some seven or so hours on trains over the last few days. It could have been a recipe for abject boredom, but thankfully, I had my Yléonore shawl to get on with, as well as being lucky enough to witness some amazing views.

The Yléonore is a lace sampler - a circular piece of lace knitting that looks incredibly complicated but is actually deceptively simple, providing you take it one little chunk at a time. The pattern is from a designer called MMario KKnits (who I discovered via the wonderful Ravelry) and is based on crochet techniques from 19th Century Eléonore Riego de la Branchardiere.

I'm using Paton's Mirage DK for this project - a variegated double knit bamboo and cotton mix which I picked up from a bargain price in Wolverhampton's House of Fraser (note to Black Country yarn lovers). It's a mix of purple, blue and green which works beautifully with the expanding circles of the shawl's design. 

Clickety-clack go the needles. Clickety-clack goes the train.

Yléonore the first

This is actually my second Yléonore. I made the first for my mother-in-law as a thank you present for all the wool she had donated to me - erm yes, that did mean she got all the wool back again, but at least she had something beautiful to show for it! (see right)

My tip for this piece is to use stitch markers to break it up into manageable pieces. As the shawl grows, it does become easy to lose your way as the rounds eventually become several hundreds of stitches in length.

Each round is made up of a pattern block repeated several times, so placing a marker after each section or pair of sections makes it much easier to count back (and realise sooner) if you make a mistake. I spent so much time going backwards and forwards again on the first shawl that I often had nothing to show at the end of an evening's knitting!

I love the perpetuity of this pattern, with just enough variation thrown into it to stop it becoming repetitive, without being overly complex. Perfect for trundling cross country on a late Sunday morning.

Festival of Quilts

There is nothing more inspiring than an enormous room full of crafty paraphernalia that's packed to the rafters with people who share your hobby in abundance and are every bit as excited about it as you are...

I'm talking of course, about the Festival of Quilts. It's a heavenly day of stash enhancement (shopping), discovery of new techniques and meeting a multitude of like-minded souls.

I'll be writing more about some of the amazing quilts I saw, and that will hopefully spur me on to create some of my own, but for now, I thought I'd share with you the day's haul.

Oh Festival of Quilts, you make me so happy

Above you can see:

• The Hana bag kit and some delicious kimono fabric fat quarters from Japan Crafts. Their fabrics are so wonderfully unusual.
• Three sets of craft-specific needles from Redditch's own John James Needles - long and short beading needles, bent-ended needles (probably not the technical term) for sewing-up knitting and some patchwork needles. Perfect for my three current crafts!
• Some yummy motif cottons from Doughty's. From the sublime to the slightly ridiculous: a William Morris print, nautical shapes and cute elephants. Definitely check out Doughty's if you're in the west of England/east Wales - they have several shops in Hereford.
• A patchwork ruler from Creative Grids - I really don't have an excuse for not starting that log cabin blanket now!
• And finally, a beautiful metre of peacock feather ribbon from a French company called Tendance Ruben. New to the show this year, they have some stunning designs from the likes of Kaffe Fassett and Amy Butler. We were utterly spoilt for choice and could easily have bought hundreds of metres worth of exquisite ribbon.

There was also something fabulous from my local Spellbound Beads but I can't tell you about that just yet - it's supposed to be a surprise...

The Festival of Quilts runs until Sunday 11th August at Birmingham's NEC. It features a hall full of stalls as well several superb exhibitions from quilters around the world. Standard tickets on the door are £15.

Strangely addictive hexagons

After several years of stashing away sumptuous fabrics and saying I'd do something with them, I have finally made my first foray into patchwork.

I was lucky enough to secure a place on one of Coats Crafts' patchwork workshops at the Sewing for Pleasure show earlier this year, where I learnt a nifty little technique for hand sewing hexagons.

Brilliant for lazy (and less than perfect) sewers like me, it involved using little binder clips to secure your fabric as it was folded over a hexagon-shaped paper template. Each corner was then secured with a couple of stitches, unclipping as you went, with the thread run straight across the back. No pinning, no tacking and you can easily slip the paper template out again to reuse it.

So I came home and got myself a little bit addicted to hexagons...

Here I am preparing my materials - some gorgeous Amy Butler fabric and some do-it-yourself hexagons. For the templates, I searched for 'hexagon template' in Google's image search and found a handy one on Homespun Scrapbooking. Having settled on a 2.5cm diameter, I replicated this several times in Microsoft Word and made a useful print-out.

It's all in the preparation

Then it was on to cutting out all the hexagons. I settled on 15 of each colour - that's 75 lovingly hand sewn hexagons all together. Although I confess, I inevitably became less meticulous as I went on, and eventually settled for chopping the fabric into strips rather than carefully cutting round each template. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the final look.

Next steps - the fun bit: preparing the design. I laid out all my cut-up hexagons and put the fabric back together in a lovely new order. You can see my final design below - big enough to make a nice lap quilt.

I'll have a 'P' please Bob.

Right now, I'm still sewing the hexagons together - with very small and neat over-sewing on each of the sides where they meet. The repetition is incredibly therapeutic and there is something very pleasing about the tessellation of the hexagonal shape.

And for all you children of the eighties out there, I'm calling this my 'Blockbusters' quilt. All together now, der - der - di  - der - der, der - di - der ...