A Trip to Cockermouth: Woolfest 2013

I started my summer holiday with a trip to Cumbria in the North-East of England. Woolfest 2013 is one of the big events on the knitting calendar and, as I usually work events rather than attend, being able to go as a visitor felt like a treat. Of course, my Woolfest visit turned into actual work once I got there - places to be and people to see - but it was good to be a 'punter' for about 20 minutes! Compared to other events I've either attended or worked, Woolfest was overwhelming. It wasn't as crowded as I had feared, but I found myself rushing from one end to another over and over. And then it was suddenly time to go home and I hadn't done half the things I had planned on doing.

(I did get to say a fond go forth and conquer the world goodbye to a friend who has landed her dream job in Canada. I am sure I will get to see Dr J again but it was bitter-sweet. But, hey, I am used to having friends spread out across the world and one day I will have the best couch-surfing adventure ever. Right? Right?)

A few obligatory photos of purchases:

Woolfest is all about celebrating British wool/yarn and I loved seeing the rare sheep breeds on display. I wasn't too happy with people who kept poking the poor sheep, but it was great seeing the animals in person. I think many knitters forget that there is an actual animal at the end of their yarn (so to speak) and I think even more knitters do not realise the variety of local wool available. I was very taken with the Wesleydales (hippies, man) but I loved the Manx Loaghtan sheep even more. When I saw the white Wesleydale/Manx mix, I could not resist. Coupled with the darker Manx, this will become a warm winter's hat.

One of my favourite destinations at any knitting event is always the Susan Crawford Vintage stall. This time I wanted to see Susan's new cotton yarn - Coquette 4ply - but it is always a joy to look at her stall. She has such a personal sense of colour and a very focused aesthetic. I didn't leave with any Coquette, but I picked up two balls of the exquisite Excelana 4ply. It feels beautiful in the ball and I want to support British yarn producers! I have a very specific design idea for this yarn. Shhh.

This was an unexpected purchase. This was described as "Hebridean 4ply" and it certainly looks like Hebridean 4ply. As you can see by my tiny hand, this is a massive amount of dark brown 4ply with a decidedly Hebridean feel. Goodness knows how much is there, but it will certainly be enough to form the backdrop/main colour of a colourwork cardigan. I am ridiculously pleased with this purchase and it was a real 'spur of the moment' one too.

And then I bought buttons. I woke up Sunday morning when the whiff of the button stalls had cleared from my head and I was confused for a moment. Had I really bought that many buttons? Of course I had. I always buy buttons at events.

The big two buttons are ear-marked for a project. The buttons at (roughly) 4 o'clock are meant for my Bute cardigan (1.5 sleeves to go!), the 8 o'clock buttons are for the Stevie cardigan and I bought the 9 o'clock buttons because they reminded me of ammonites. We like fossils in Casa Bookish! The rest of the buttons were bought for unspecified future projects.

It was very good to meet a lot of friends - both old and new. Apologies if I missed seeing you or if I was only there for a second - it was a manic day. I think if I am to do Woolfest again, I will have to stay overnight. One day isn't really enough! And on that note I think I shall go enjoy the rest of my holiday.

Pattern: Hoxne

Hoxne is the second pattern to be released from the Doggerland: Knits from a Lost Landscape collection. The shawl is named after a small village in Suffolk. Hoxne was inhabited as early as 320,000 years ago but the site shows signs of continual flint tool production through the ages. Flint is one of the key materials of North European prehistory - and I knew I wanted to design a shawl evocative of flint tools.

I know flint very well.

My childhood landscape was shaped by the ice age: softly rolling hills and a large moraine we called Tornved Bjerg (literally: Tornved Mountain).

Local farmers cursed the vanished glaciers for leaving so much debris behind as they worked the stone-filled fields, but I loved running across the newly tilled land and finding pieces of flint. I held the small stones in my hands as though they were gold nuggets. They were warm from the sun, yet cool to the touch. They were soft to hold, yet had sharp edges. I didn't realise until much later in my life that I had probably been picking up worked pieces of flint in a landscape full of prehistoric archaeology.

Hoxne reminds me of being that child - so inquisitive and seeing something special in everyday things. I hope I haven't lost either quality.

The shawl is knitted in Snældan 1ply - I keep referring to this yarn as Karie's Favourite Lace Yarn and that still holds true (I should write a Desert Island Yarns entry at some point). It is soft, holds so much character and it blocks out beautifully. Snældan is still spun in the way that it was spun in the 1940s and I love how it feels alive in your hands. Some yarns are processed beyond recognition but Snældan 1ply retains this magical feeling of authenticity and landscape which is so central to what I'm trying to do with Doggerland.

The Island Wool Company will be featuring Hoxne on their website - keep a look out and do browse that Snældan section. I continue to be thankful that Fiona & Daniel have chosen to make my beloved Faroese yarns available for UK knitters. It makes my life a lot easier!

Tomorrow I will be heading to Woolfest with my Glasgow knitting group. If you see me, do say hello!

Back to Basics

Busy times in Casa Bookish. True to form I am working on lots of things I cannot show you - when you design for magazines they don't want any previews leaking out months and months before the actual magazine is published. And so I can only show one thing out of the .. eight? .. projects in progress.

This is the Stevie cardigan I mentioned previously. It is a Sarah Hatton design from Rowan Studio 24. I am knitting it in the recommended yarn(!) - Rowan Wool Cotton in 'French Navy' - and the real colour is a bit darker. It's a cracker of a pattern: a top-down, seamless knit which is always something I love knitting. The yoke is the only tricky bit and after you've completed it, it's plain stocking stitch all the way. I would probably have finished in within a fortnight if it weren't for all those other projects, but as it is I knit on it when I need to relax with my knitting rather than worry about maths.

Navy is a new obsession of mine. I recently did a massive wardrobe cull where I threw out clothes I hadn't worn in years, clothes that didn't fit, and worn-out clothes I couldn't justify wearing anymore. The cull made it easy to see what I actually have in my wardrobe and I was surprised to see a lot of navy. Navy is my new black, apparently.

And so I am knitting a navy cardigan. The style is classic and the colour will go with everything. I need wardrobe staples - I have plenty of funky cardigans and jumpers, but I need basics. Expect my rare moments of non-work knitting to reflect this!

I have had a look on Ravelry and inspired by Mooncalf's Pinterest board full of classic shapes, I'm thinking of  making a list of classic, basic cardigans and jumpers. I am terrible (terrible!) at sticking to resolutions but it'll be good to have a list around. So far I am thinking along the lines of Cecily Glowik MacDonald's River Pullover, Amy Christoffer's Acer Cardigan and Windsor Cardigan (she does fab basics), and Tanis Lavallee's Reverb.

Any classic/basic patterns you'd like to recommend?

A Trip to Holmfirth

I usually love train journeys. I love the sounds of travelling on a train, I love having time to looking at the landscape, and I love knitting on trains. My ideal holiday would be a train journey across a country or a continent. It is just so relaxing. Except if you are travelling down the East Coast of Britain on a hot and sticky Sunday in June. Then a train journey is hell on earth. After a five-hour journey, it was a joy to arrive at my destination in Yorkshire.

I have been to the Rowan Yarns HQ several times now and after the initial excitement of my first visit, I am now able to appreciate the Mill for other things than OMG, I recognise that cardigan and gosh, that's a lot of yarn. This time I closed my eyes and soaked up the quietness of the setting and recharged my batteries.

Most of the Mill is devoted to offices, but the workshop room never fails to make me smile. It is a riot of colour and textures - the walls are laid out like a giant yarn shop (though nothing is for sale), the tables and chairs are covered in Rowan fabric and every nook and cranny features Rowan projects. The photo above shows the Wool Week 2012 collection (patterns for which you can download for free from the Rowan website) tucked away in a corner with a Kaffe Fassett pattern library on the shelves underneath.

As workshop rooms go, this is hard to beat for location and creative spirit. As you can imagine.

I was there to preview the Autumn/Winter 2013 Rowan collection. It is always odd to preview winter garments and yarns in the height of summer, but yarn companies work with long lead-times. I know that just this past week they were shooting the Summer/Spring 2014 magazine which means that the Design Room is now currently hard at work on preparing for Autumn/Winter 2014!

(Needless to say, the mannequins on the right have nothing to do with autumnal or winter knits- I just loved the simple styling and the fruity colours.)

I cannot say anything about the Autumn/Winter 2013 collection - simply because it is yet to be released (although it will be released in a month or so). There are several new yarns and it is always one of the highlights of a Mill trip to see these. I have my own personal favourite already - but I always try to remember that I am not there for myself - I am there to assess how knitters will respond to the new yarns. It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it!

Unfortunately I suffered from insomnia whilst visiting Holmfirth, but it meant I could work on the Stevie cardigan by the lovely Sarah Hatton. Because I live in Scotland, I'm doing the long-sleeved version(!) and I'm knitting it in Rowan Wool Cotton in French Navy. It is a top-down cardigan and I'm into the body section now which means perfect knitting night project.

The train journey back was much, much better. And I even managed to catch a glimpse of Antony Gormley's The Angel of the North.

Thinking With My Fingers

I have been thinking about what unites all the things I do and the things I care about. It struck me that I need my hands in order to translate (or transmit) all the things in my head. I am far more eloquent when I write than when I speak. I express my ideas better when I draw or knit them than if I try to describe them. And I sit down to tap away at a keyboard when I feel I have a nebulous notion brewing away in my head. The Greek philosopher Plato once addressed the mind-body problem and how the mind and body can be connected. Plato was a great fan of 'the soul' and thought our bodies inferior. Philosophers have discussed this ever since (it's known as Dualism) - when I was younger, I'd scoff at my body and be firmly in Plato's camp. The life of the mind! Pure soul! These days I definitely cannot imagine life without my fingers acting as transmitters or translators. We all mellow as we get older, don't we?

Anyway, I began thinking about this because I am just back from a work trip to Yorkshire. I had my camera with me and I snapped a lot of photos - but mostly unexpected photos.

Who knew I'd ever take an arty photo of a horse grazing in a field as a way of expressing my innermost thoughts? But there you go: life is bright and sunny with a tinge of blue. Beautiful things are in focus, bigger things are rather blurry (but I'm pushing those to the back for the time being). And everything is good.

I want to thank everybody for the lovely stream of messages concerning Doggerland. When I first started talking about my idea for the collection, a few people told me it was a bit too “out there” so I didn’t know what to expect .. but I have received so much great feedback and so much support over the last week. I have been particularly thrilled by emails from strangers who told me about their own connection to the Doggerland area - if I can make people think about their personal/emotional connections to landscapes and knitting, I have done my job well.

This would have been an excellent time to insert a photo of sheep grazing on Yorkshire hills. Unfortunately I had to take those photos from a moving train and this is the best one. Try to spot the sheep:

I'll write more about my work trip to Yorkshire later - it was essentially a three-day knitting & yarn mini-conference at this place:

As I said, everything is good. I am meeting interesting people, I am being pushed out of my comfort zone, and I am thinking a lot with my fingers.

A few links &c:

• You can still pre-order my Doggerland collection and get 20% off. Hurry, though, as the offer only runs for a few more days.
• Stories In Stitches is a new venture from the amazing Donna Druchunas. Stories in Stitches combine so many of my favourite things: story-telling, knitting, writing and social history - not to mention that strange (but so exhilarating) sense of continuity and connection across places and ages you get when you combine all those things.
• A very interesting interview with Harry Potter star, Emma Watson. Yes, really. I was struck by her take on feeling insecure and trying to balance her own self-perception with how others perceive her.
• Finally, a great article about how the Eurovision Song Contest can be read as something other than just a way of life six-months-long week-long fun evening. It's a way of nation-building in the 21st century.

Pre-order Doggerland - Join the Journey.

After so many months of hard work, Doggerland: Knits from a Lost Landscape is finally available to pre-order through Ravelry. The first pattern will be the Ronaes Shawl (as seen in the photos) but I will write more about the shawl when I release it on June 10. The idea for the Doggerland collection first came to me when I was looking at artefacts in the National Museum of Denmark's Prehistory section.

I was looking at a bone antler fragment carved with beautiful, simple designs when my partner started reading aloud a piece about the lost region of Doggerland – a Mesolithic landscape now lost to the North Sea between the UK and Scandinavia (Mesolithic means "Middle Stone Age"). I loved the simplicity of the carved antler and I loved the story of a lost landscape that once formed a land bridge between Denmark (where I grew up) and Britain (where I now live).

The prehistory sections of The National Museum of Scotland and the National Museum of Denmark yielded much inspiration: worked flintstones, carved antler bones, well-preserved fykes, and excavated shell middens. Motifs and textures are either directly taken from Mesolithic artefacts found in the Doggerland region (or surrounding areas) or use them as visual cues. The Mesolithic period was characterised by very geometric designs: lines, dots, circles and simple shapes. Shapes and motifs you will find throughout the collection, both in the knitting patterns and the illustrations.

It is difficult to determine what types of textiles Mesolithic people made, what materials they used and how they wore their clothes. Textiles are made from organic materials and therefore they decay over the thousands of years between the Mesolithic Era and today. Occasionally archaeologists unearth tiny treasures: a maritime excavation off the coast of Denmark discovered one single thread of spun plant material, for instance.

The Doggerland collection does not seek to recreate Mesolithic textiles - but it wishes to prompt the imagination. Choose your materials with care - and think about the landscape and environment to which they belong.

Designing this collection was an exercise in psycho-geography for me and I would like to think that knitting these designs will become a journey through your personal landscapes too. I wanted to tell the story of a lost landscape but also remind you that we all walk in landscapes like Doggerland. Where we live was once covered by sea and in time will once again be covered.

The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived 10,000 years ago were not all that different from you and me.

Doggerland: Knits from a Lost Landscape is available to pre-order until June 10. It costs £12 which is a special pre-order price (on June 10 going forward it will cost £15). The patterns will be released every few weeks and will be available as single downloads at £3 each.

Phew. I feel emotionally drained now!