Edinburgh Yarn Festival 2013

The inaugural Edinburgh Yarn Festival took place yesterday. In a word, it was mental. We arrived just before 10am ( thanks to me setting the alarm to 5.45pm rather than 5.45am) and the queue was already very long. I had time for a cup of coffee and a quick hello to familiar faces before heading off to teach my class on two-handed colourwork.

I had a lot of fun with my class trying to cover everything from colour theory, yarn dominance and Continental knitting before delving into two-handed colourwork. I am proud to say that my students didn't bat an eyelid and asked really great questions throughout. They all left with some fabulous swatches - and later I saw several of them buying materials for colourwork projects. I love my job!

After the class had ended, I went out into the Drill Hall and it was .. packed. Here's photographic evidence - the tables in the foreground was part of the in-house cafe who had to call in extra help!

According to the organisers, EYF played host to 1452 adult visitors, 220 children, 40 stallholders, 30 volunteers .. and 4 dogs (that I saw). The vendor space was divided into three sections. The front hall, the main hall (which you see in the background) and the "wing". The place was packed.

How packed? Well, I have been joking with Lilith of Old Maiden Aunt that we need to run t-shirts saying "I survived the Old Maiden Aunt scrum at EdinYarnFest 2013!". To wit:

Lilith's looking fairly relaxed there, but we were all running on adrenaline! The lovely lady in the turquoise cardigan is Cathy of StitchMastery fame. She was an ocean of calm throughout the day.

Louise Hunt of the Caithness Craft Collective podcast interviewed me which was a lot of fun. We actually managed to find somewhere away from the crowd so there won't be too much hustle and bustle in the background. I also met Aimee of the knit.spin.cake podcast so who know what might happen there in the future!

A huge thank you to everybody who stopped me just to say hello: a lot of familiar faces and a lot of unfamiliar ones. I was also amused by how many people stopped my partner Dave to say hello - and I have also spotted him in several photos posted by people on Ravelry and Twitter. Ladies do like a bearded man in a well-loved knitted jumper!

So many lovely things to see, touch, smell, and buy .. but I just wound up with two small purchases. It was very late in the afternoon before I had any time to look at the stalls and I was much too tired to make informed decisions. I did scout out some definite future purchases from Skein Queen, Lionness Arts, Ripples Crafts, and Yarn Pony. Nothing beats seeing colourways and feeling base yarns in person.

And nothing beats spending time with good people: Joeli, Kat (check out The Crochet Project! Way to go, Kat!),  Amanda of OwlPrintPanda, Kristen, Cassandra of The Stitchery and waving busy hellos to Ysolda (who was there with Sarah, Bex and the magical photobooth). It was very good to meet up with Susan Crawford - Gavin & Dave exchanged tips on modelling knitwear which was hilarious (so I may have been close to hysterical laughter that point of the day but it was still funny).

Shout-outs to the wonderful people of Glasgow Stitch'n'Knit who insisted I sat down occasionally and the marvellous Cayt who brought me breakfast at 2.30pm! What was it I said about being fuelled by adrenaline?

Finally, thank you to Jo, Linda and Mica who organised the event. You did such an amazing job weaving all these strands together and creating something as beautiful (and mental) as Edinburgh Yarn Festival 2013. Thank you, thank you.

Let's do it all again next year!

Preview: Edinburgh Yarn Festival

Look what I spotted on the streets of Glasgow the other day..

The inaugural Edinburgh Yarn Festival is taking place on March 16 at Edinburgh's Out of the Blue arts venue and I am terribly, terribly excited.

The day looks to be pretty spectacular: more than 35 stall holders (some of whom are completely new to me!), interesting classes, and a lot of fab, fab people there.

The real emphasis is upon Scottish talent in the textile world and the organisers have come up with some crackers. I know we have a really special thing going on with dyers & designers here in Scotland but it still feels amazing to see the roll call at EYF: Ysolda, Ripples Crafts, Old Maiden Aunt, Skein Queen, Yarn Pony, Tin Can Knits, Kristen Orme, Travelling Yarns, Shilasdair, Alpaca Loft Fibre and OwnPrintPanda. Several fabulous local yarn shops are also supporting the event: Once A Sheep, Woolfish, Wee Country Yarns, and The Woolly Brew all have stalls and the marvellous Kathy's Knits is extending her opening hours (remember, stockist of the ultra-rare St. Kilda laceweight!). A real smorgasbord of the best we have to offer here in Scotland.

Plus the Festival is also playing hosts to some serious English talent. None other than Susan Crawford will be there with some exciting news about A Stitch in Time Vol. 1! Textile Garden will be showing off their outstanding selection of buttons. LionessArts and her beautiful yarns will be there too, good god.

And I’ll be there too. I am teaching a class on two-hand colour knitting - it’s completely sold out, sorry - and as a special treat, the class participants will be the very first people to get a pattern from my Doggerland collection. You’ll see several of my designs on the Old Maiden Aunt stand including the OMA yarn club patterns. Please do say hello if you see me. I'll probably be my usual stressed, awkward self but I love meeting people who share my passions. My partner David will be there too, so if you see a skinny man wearing a beetroot-coloured jumper, that's the one. He doesn't knit but he adores knitters.

I am so, so excited. It’s Saturday March 16. £2 on the door at Out of the Blue (the Old Drill Hall), Edinburgh. Come support the Scottish creative community!

Gosh, it is going to be so much fun.

My Lifestyle Guru Disqualification

Online identity, knitting celebrities and internet jealousy. We have covered a lot here recently. I'm going to return to the discussion but first I want to share a slice of what it is all about (for me, anyway): knitting.

This morning I cast off another sample for my Doggerland collection. I think I first mentioned the collection about a year ago - well it has been a long journey to get here and I'll write more about this as I release the patterns. But I just love looking at this pile of samples (plus random bits of yarn). The pile looks so right even if the samples still need to be dressed and it is lacking a couple of core pieces still to be knitted.

I am getting there! Woo!

And I think that brings me neatly round to the topic that Fourth Edition has been circling around recently: success.

Some people want a big car. Other people want to be recognised in the supermarket. All of us want to be able to pay our bills. I have spent a lot of time thinking about success and how I define it. I like being able to pay bills, but I am definitely not concerned with driving a car or being stopped in the street. No, I really truly love when what I produce resembles what has been going on in my head. When my brain and fingers work together to produce something that stays true to the core idea and tells the story I want to be telling.

'Story-telling' was a recurrent word in the discussion. It is perhaps a post-modern conceit that we tell stories in order to construct ourselves but I think I do relate to my craft and my designs as forms of story-telling. I want to explore my Scandinavian heritage; the landscapes both inside and outwith myself and try to make sense of the world through knitting.

I somehow worry(!) that I hover between textile art and textile craft - that somehow my ideas are too absurd and abstract for the relatively simple pleasure of working a piece of string with two sticks. I have spent almost 12 months trying to nail Doggerland because it started out as a huge, unwieldy idea. When I showed my introduction to some friends, the feedback was enthusiastic but agreed that maybe I should try to be a touch more accessible.

And so I am here looking at a pile of unblocked knits and I feel so proud. To me, this is success.

And this is who I am: I design knits inspired by psychogeography, land art, and Mesolithic archaeology. I wear red and green together. I am quiet in public and most happy when I'm with just a handful of friends. I love early 20th century culture and T.S. Eliot is my favourite writer. And I think the Eurovision Song Contest is the best thing since sliced bread. All that combined pretty much disqualifies me for any position as a lifestyle guru. Also, I eat the cake as soon as it's out of the oven.

Besides, the idea of a knitting celebrity is still weird. If the founder of Wikipedia has trouble identifying himself as 'internet famous', I think it's fair to say that we need to re-assess the whole idea of internet fame. The internet is an awfully big pond.

A Dash of Colour, Beauty & Cynicism.

I have been working a lot with undyed yarns recently - one mossy green has crept into the Doggerland collection but otherwise I am using all natural fleece colours. I really enjoy it - of course I do - but I do yearn for some colour in my knitting. Just a little pop of something decadent.

A bit of birthday yarn arrived yesterday. My lovely gran sent me 1100 yrds of 2ply merino wool from Danish company, DesignClub. This red is marvellous - it has unusual depth to it and the yarn has some great bounce. It was spun at Henrichsens Uldspinneri, a Danish woollen mill dating back to the 19th century. I've used the yarn before and I am looking forward to using it again ..

I thought I'd also show you the necklace pendants which my friend Paula made for my birthday. They are so pretty.

I was recently sent a link to Craftypod - specifically an episode which discussed the idea of "the knitting celebrity" and internet jealousy. It is a really interesting podcast and if you can spare 30 minutes, I recommend you give it a listen.

First, though, some words from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He was asked about being "internet famous"

Right now, I'm sitting in a public library minding my own business taking a break from what I was working on.  No one is likely to recognize or notice me here..

But I am, as the question asks, "Internet famous".  That phrase is vague and could mean a lot of things, but for me what it means is that Wikipedia is very very very famous and Wikia is very famous, and so I'm a little bit famous as a result..

Because of this, I'm able to meet with government officials all around the world to put forward my views on the importance of freedom of speech and openness and transparency.  I find this useful, and I believe in many cases I've had an impact.  (It is never easy to be sure.)

Back to the Craftypod podcast. I was struck by a couple of things.

1) Craft is HUGE. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of segmented markets and niches: knitting, crochet, scrap-booking, quilting, embroidery, dress-making.. These days knitting can be divided into a lot of niches too (I have written a bit more about that here).

Vickie Howell may talk about being a leader in the craft industry - but it is her corner of the craft industry in which she is a leader (gatekeeper is probably the better term). This probably makes me a bad person, but I had never heard of her before I listened to the podcast. I googled her subsequently and she's done craft TV in the States, works for a US yarn company and fronts her own yarn line. She looks like a cool person - but she is not part of my knitting landscape. And that is okay. I'd hate to have a totally uniform definition of "cool knitting" and what I "should be knitting".

2) There was also a lot of talk about "the 2005 generation" and marketing. The podcast served up a massive dollop of nostalgia for the good old days when you could upload a simple scarf pattern and people would go nuts for it.

I think there will always be people talking about the "good old days when things were simple". It is a generational thing and on the internet a generation is a very small, finite thing (maybe 2 years? 3 years?).

2008 was the year when I got back into knitting in a major, major way. I remember when the February Lady Sweater was published via Ravelry and it was a huge thing. Do we have that sort of knitting landscape these days? No.It is probably harder to get noticed across the board, but incredibly talented people do manage it. Designers have to up their game and I don't think that's a bad thing. Knitters everywhere are the winners in this scenario.

(Also, the segmented knitting landscape means that if you are really into designing crazy intarsia dog coats, for instance, you will find "your people" pretty quickly.)

3) I wasn't a fan of the whole cross-channel "hustling" mentioned in the podcast- but that's because I am one of those people who tune out people who endlessly promote themselves on as many channels as they can. Maybe I am just old in social media terms but there is a whole signal-to-noise thing which I think many marketeers often forget. Social media isn't always about quantity - quality plays a huge part too. But that's probably a whole 'nother topic. (Psst, this is a great blog post about using Twitter)

I'll be honest: that podcast made me feel very cynical and I don't like feeling cynical - especially not about knitting.

I am left here still thinking about Jimmy Wales' words. The Q&A I linked above also included these lines:

I don't have a lot of money.  I don't have a lot of power in the top-down command-and-control sense.  But I do have a lot of influence.  I like that part of it.

Jimmy Wales is a lot more famous than any knitting "celebrity" and wields a lot more power and influence than I can begin to imagine. Yet he speaks with humility and a wry sense of humour. I think we could all take a lesson from him.

Paused

My wrist is hurting. It happens occasionally as I have hypermobile joints. Hypermobility doesn't hamper me much in everyday life - I just struggle to open jars and my balance is a tad wonky. I do have recurrent problems with my hands and wrists: constant knitting and typing will cause RSI in most people, of course, but  I am particularly susceptible. So what is a girl to do when deadlines are looming and there must be knitting? She pauses.

I have taken two days off from knitting and tried to avoid using my hands too much (*fidgets*). Instead I have polished off a few books, begun reading another, and I've celebrated my mumble-mumble birthday.

My man and I went on a jaunty little trip to Edinburgh to see The National Museum of Scotland's special exhibition on Vikings. The exhibition was mainly made up of finds from a handful of Swedish high-status settlements - interesting to me since I am so familiar with every day Danish Viking finds, but also inexplicably never really explained by the exhibition itself. The lay-out was also odd as most displays could only be viewed by one or two people at a time (we waited between five and seven minutes between each display case).

But the spindle whorls were pretty.

For me, the Vikings feel so modern and seeing  needle-binding (again, not explained), dyeing, spinning and weaving tools just felt so .. natural. These methods are still in use, the tools are the same and we all like a bit of ornamentation on the tools we use the most.

Post-birthday the world seemed to pause and snow came tumbling down. I went out to take photos of a recently finished knitting object (and some other things but I cannot show you those). But I was stopped in my tracks.

A trickster snowman and his dog (bear?) had been built on the pathway. I loved them. Sinister, menacing, and melting.

I did manage to take some photos but taking photos of scarves are really difficult when your Official Photographer is at work and the snow had already begun to turn slushy.

Sarah Hatton's lovely Edith shawl/scarf knitted in Rowan Kidsilk Haze in the colourway "Fern".

I have long been wanting to knit it and since I have been working on some knitting maths lately (pro tip: never use a stitch pattern running over a prime number as your base unit), I wanted to try out Sarah's pattern because I knew her numbers would work beautifully. And I wanted the scarf too, of course! I went slightly off-pattern thanks to external distraction and the end result is soft, beautiful and a great deal more lacy than it should have been. It was a joy to knit. I love Kidsilk Haze so much.

Finally, a big thank you to my friend Paula who gave me a beautiful birthday present: two hand-stitched pendants made from silk with gorgeous, delicate flowers embroidered on top. I feel truly honoured to count some amazing crafters as friends and few are as talented as Paula.

Paused. Some time to think. Snow here and then gone. Kind gestures from people. I like my life like this.

Bookish Knits in Knit Now

There is a reason why I call myself Karie Bookish - I love books and I love reading. Family lore has it that whenever they couldn't find me I'd be hiding somewhere with a book. I also love knitting. When I was asked to design a number of bookish knits for Knit Now Magazine, I had to pinch myself. What a dream assignment.

The first pattern is the Eyre Shawl.

I reread Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 2011. The novel was extraordinary - far richer than I had grasped when my 14 year-old self had first read it. Jane was a study in self-respect, self-reliance, and intelligence:

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

But Jane wasn't the only reason why I wanted to design a shawl. The housekeeper at Thornfield Hall - the inimitable Mrs Fairfax - was constantly knitting throughout the novel and kept having small asides about how she really had to finish this row..

The recent film adaptation featured a number of knitted shawls - one spawned several garterstitch shawl patterns on Ravelry - but I wanted to take a different direction. I wanted to design a shawl that was both as delicate and strong as Jane herself - something which Mrs Fairfax would have enjoyed knitting.

My Eyre shawl has an all-over chevron pattern which gently fans into a leaf border. It is very easy to customise: like most of my shawl patterns, Eyre has a design feature which means you can repeat the central chevron stitch pattern as many times as you'd like before starting the border. I like shawls like that because it means you can customise the size of the shawl to suit your yardage.

The sample shown was knitted in Malabrigo Lace in "Applewood". It blocked out beautifully and is wonderfully soft.

I also designed a hat and fingerless gloves set for the magazine.

I set myself the challenge of designing an Art Deco-inspired accessories set which would be accessible for beginner knitters. That means everything is knitted flat. It is a bit of a controversial decision in these Everything Must Be Knitted On Circular Needles times, but I've spent so much time teaching beginning knitters that I understood how frustrating it can be to see a beautiful pattern and not be able to knit because you're not yet confident enough to use double-pointed needles or circs. So, everything is knitted flat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was my starting point - after all, Baz Luhrmann has an adaptation out later this year and the High Street is already filled with Art Deco inspired clothes. The 1920s silouette was boyish and simple, but the details were everything but. I wanted to capture the lavish and carefree world of Gatsby and I did so by choosing a cashmere-blend yarn and use a glitzy metallic yarn as contrast. Likewise, I decided against designing something practical - this Gatsby set will not keep you warm, but it will make you feel glamorous and feminine.

The set is knitted in Rowan Cashsoft 4ply and Anchor Artiste Metallic in "Thunder" and "Blue" respectively. The hat is photographed as a beanie but is meant to be a very nonchalant beret à la Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde.

Knit Now Magazine issue 18 will be in stores from Thursday. You can order it online too.

PS. Knit Now has a history of supporting some truly talented indie designers like Jacqui Harding, Anna Elliott, Ella Austin, Elly Doyle, Anni Howard, Woolly Wormhead and Rachel Coopey. Just one reason among many why they are awesome.