We left on Thursday 15 Sept, the first day of a 22 day adventure taking in Shetland Wool Week. I have kept a detailed journal of the visit and will now post about each day, hopefully daily, but apologies if life gets in the way a bit and there is a gap. Each day I will try and post something about our surroundings and of course TEXTILES.
I knew I just had to pack wool jumpers, wool skirts, polo necks and boots but as we packed up it didn't seem real. We left with the thermometer showing 30oC and that was outside! We were taking our Wildax Motorhome and this would be our home for 3 weeks.
Our home!
Our first stop was Barnard Castle - as we like the Bowes Museum! We left after breakfast and the journey along the A11, A14 and A1 was pretty uneventful. There were 3 highlights:
at Ferrybridge I noticed the temperature had got down to 19oC outside. (I do like the fact that the control panel in the motorhome gives us outside and inside temperatures)
we discovered Wetherby services were great ( as service stations go)
Barnard Castle Caravan Club site sells really nice ice cream, one tub was enough for 3 portions each. None of this is worthy of a photo !
In terms of Textiles, it was a good day. When I was not driving there was much time for planning knitting and knitting. Now that I had made a crofthoose hat and journal over ( see earlier posts 12 Sept 16, 26 Aug16) I still had some meadowsweet yarn left over. In 2014 I had knitted some Skaw fingerless gloves (mitts?) to match the Shetland hat for that year ( post of 27Oct14 and this year I would knit some to match the jumper, hat and journal cover. Felicity Ford (Knitsonic) was running a KAL (knitalong) based on a pattern in her Knitsonic Stranded Colourwork Book using Jamieson and Smith yarn. I have the book and it is great - however, the fair isle pattern runs around the hand. My 'style' training tells me that horizontal bands on broad hands make the hands look even fatter! Hence in 2014 I designed the Skaw gloves to have a vertical colour work pattern on them. I get lots of compliments about them so I have decided to repeat the pattern, again incorporating my hand dyed yarn.
I believed the pattern to be a traditional one called Old Shale. I googled it to check and got fascinated by a long discussion of the differences between Old Shale and Feather and Fan, who named it first and whether it should be all garter stitch. ( if you are interested look at Liz Lovick's blog- address below). I decided that I would base my knitting on the pattern from Gladys Amedro in her book Shetland Lace, it would tie together yarn dyed using plants from my lane ( more accurately the lane running past our house) and Shetland - perfect! So some calculating to get the gloves long enough and wide enough....and a sample knit.
Sample of Old Shale from the book
I bought the Gladys Amedro book when I first visited Shetland in 2000, it remains one of my favourite lace knitting books. I like the fact that she uses T for 'take in' (ie k2tog) and c for 'cast up' or wool forwards. There are no charts, so it is a good discipline to translate from the written instructions to making your own chart - it helps to keep the brain young.
Liz Lovick's blog: www.northernlace.wordpress.com 12 Mar 10
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