Wilting - Some Links While I Melt

As a heatwave has swept across the UK, activities in Casa Bookish have been kept to a bare minimum. Oh, there was that trip to Linlithgow Palace, a trip to Edinburgh, some art exhibitions,  designing/plotting, preparations for the launch of new Autumn/Winter yarn collections - but mainly I have languished in the shade with an ice cream for company. I've enjoyed some really fantastic and thought-provoking Twitter conversations about hand-knitting, fashion, and women's self-image. So, in short: I don't exactly lack blog post material. I just lack the energy and presence of mind to write the blog posts! What's a girl to do? Well, I have some choice links for you to peruse whilst I hope for cooler temps to hit my corner of the UK:

• Ventures & Adventures in Topography - a podcast about rambling through London using old walking guides. Yes, I continue to be fascinated by psychogeography - how we interact with landscapes and how landscapes interact with us.
• Speaking of which: Cafe Pantopia - trying to establish "a common meeting-place that traverses the vast distances of the North Atlantic Ocean." I am a North Atlantic Ocean girl and I love, love, love this idea.
• Fringe Association is my new favourite knitting blog. There. I said it. She makes me look at things differently. FA  is a refreshing, smart look at knitting, style, and design.
• I am currently teaching myself (very basic) French using DuoLingo. I'd quite like an outline of basic grammar alongside vocabulary lessons and commonly used phrases, but I genuinely feel like I'm learning Stuff.
• Fancy living somewhere which has serious literary credentials? Why, William Blake's cottage is for sale!
• And this serves a neat segueway into the Man Booker longlist. The jury is spear-headed by Robert MacFarlane whose The Old Ways is my current bedside table book. In Days of Yore I would have had Opinions but Opinions have been wilted by the heat and an insane amount of work knitting.
• I have finished a book recently, though. Yes, That Book by That Author. I enjoyed it - and it was very low on gore which I appreciated. I am a squeamish reader in some ways.

And how are you doing?

A Joy Forever

We are all of us, like the man in Plato's cave, seeing the shadows of ourselves on the walls of our prison house and, alas, all too often we mistake the shadow for substance. The knitter's craft has taught me to have a profound respect for the aesthetic heritage that is the birthright of all mankind. It has led me to seek the Good; the best tools and the finest material out of which to create the ideas that have dominated my days; to seek the True; the perfection in line and structure that is the most perfect expression in terms of design I can find for those things I have made with my hands; to forget Beauty; knowing that if a thing is good and true then beauty can well be left to look after herself. - James Norbury.

How the Land Lies: The Gillean Hat

How do we understand a landscape? From satnavs and street lights to bus routes and border controls, our twenty-first century landscape is controlled and marked in a myriad of ways. We are told how best to reach our destination (the destination being more important than the journey!), not to trespass, and to have our passport ready for inspection. Not only does Google Earth enables us to walk the streets of cities we will never visit from the comfort of our own homes, but computer-generated landscapes can end up feel more real than the landscape outside our windows.

(I still remember the shock coursing through my body when I first played Diablo II and discovered the village in Diablo had been burned down. It was a real, physical reaction to a simulated environment.)

Thankfully human beings still want to feel we are part of our actual, real surroundings.

We want to inhabit our landscape emotionally as well as physically. We take shortcuts ('desire lines') when the official path seems too circuitous; we respond to stark urban environments by planting trees and flowers; and we turn spaces into places by telling tales about them: "This is where I played as a child" and "Turn left at the tree that was hit by lightning."

And the Gillean Hat is partly a response to this story-telling impulse, this desire to belong.

The Gillean hat is named after Caisteal nan Gillean - a Mesolithic archaeology site on the Scottish island of Oronsay. I am fascinated by how we choose to name sites and how many layers of stories we can find in place names. Caisteal nan Gillean literally means 'the fort of the boys' and since we will never know the actual Mesolithic name of the site, the boys will linger.

But there are other ways of marking your place in the world when words are no longer remembered and myths about a place have ceased to be told. Caisteal nan Gillean has plenty of evidence that it was a place tied to memories, stories, experiences and meaning. People inhabited the island on many occasions and left behind traces of their lives.

I am using a stylised shell/limpet motif in this hat. Oronsay is famous for its shell middens - solid evidence of human activity in a landscape - and I wanted to throw a handful of these shells across a hat. The hat uses beautiful organic Faroese yarns that reflect an isolated island environment: a grassy green flickers at the edge whilst the two greys capture the idea of shells strewn across weathered stones. A link to a past landscape in a own present-day world.

If you want to read more about how we relate to landscapes - both internal and external ones - I recommend Robert Macfarlane's beautiful The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot.

That Sweet Spot: On Knitting Needles

I think we all have our own sweet spot in knitting whether we realise it or not. When you first start out knitting, you will probably try all types of knitting: chunky yarns on big needles, double-pointed needles and a self-striping 4ply for your first sock, scarf knitting using textured yarn on straight needles and so forth. Some people will continue to bounce back and forth, but most knitters will find their preferred type of knitting eventually. My sweet spot? I rarely use anything below 3mm (US 2) and above 5mm (US 8). I prefer circular needles above anything else - 80 cm (32") being my preferred cable length. I do not get along with interchangeable needles - an expensive lesson to learn - but want my circs to be fixed. As someone who designs and knits a lot of lace, I need a smooth join between needle and cable as well as a pointy tip. I'm less fussy about the material of the needle - wood, bamboo and good quality metal all work well for me.

(As for brands, there is a certain sense of one-upmanship in knitting (a bit like Top Trumps for crafty grown-ups) and I'm always a bit reluctant to play along with this. Apologies if the next bit reads like me slamming down a card or two.)

Until recently my go-to needles have been Addi Bamboo circs. They are not always ideal as the bamboo can be a bit soft and easily scratched, but I like how they feel in my hands. They are lightweight, yarns pass smoothly across the needles rather than slip across, and the cable has a pleasing solidity to it whilst still being flexible.

Addi Bamboos are not as easy to get as KnitPros and I have a fair amount of wooden KPs as a result. The needles themselves are smooth and the tips are nice and pointy. I am less keen on the cable which does not feel as high quality as the needle part. This was recently confirmed by a KP cable snapping at the join. If I were a DPN user or a straight needles gal, I'd probably like KPs more.

Addi Turbos form another big part of my tool box. The needles tend to be on the blunt side and the cables can have kinks (the latter is easily rectified by strategic steaming) but they are good workhorse needles. My 3.75mm (US 5) Addi Turbos remain my Beloved for no apparent reason other than 'they fit my hands so well'.

And then at Woolfest I decided to try out Chiaogoo needles after hearing friends talk about them like they were the second coming. I switched needles on a project so I could test them almost immediately and I've been in love ever since. They really, really hit that sweet spot for me.

The tip are pointy and have a nice, long angle to them which means I can quickly move from stitch to stitch (especially noticeable when working decreases into the back of the loop). The needles themselves are smooth but with the tiniest hint of grip which means slippery yarns stay put and my rhythm remains the same regardless of type of yarn. The join is equally smooth and allows for easy movement of stitches from cable to needle (always key).

But I am deeply impressed by the cable.

The cable feels substantial, but not weighty. No memory means no potential kinks and no curcling around when I magic-loop. I have also tried walking around whilst knitting an almost-finished top-down jumper(!) and the cable + join do not feel unduly stressed. The cable may feel slightly bulky for some knitters - especially if you are used to KPs - but I really like it. I have also road-tested the cable with flimsy lace knitting and it still outperformed.

To absolutely nobody's surprise, I have since added Chiaogoos in most of my preferred sizes to the toolbox. It was a bit of an indulgence but having proper tools make such a difference to me. I have finished two pieces of sample knitting since the needles arrived and a third is almost done. They have really enhanced my knitting joy.

What tools are essential to you? What sort of needles fit your hands and your style of knitting? What do you look for in a good set of needles? We are all different and I'm curious to hear about other people's sweet spots.

Quick Freebie: Kirkja

My Kirkja shawl pattern is currently available for free on Ravelry. Offer expired, sorry! As you may be aware, local boy Andy Murray took home the Wimbledon men's title yesterday. He is the first British male to do so for 77 years (though the marvellous Virginia Wade won the women's title in 1977). Scotland has gone a bit crazy as a result - and I have lived in Glasgow so long that I feel this strange sense of pride too. It's rather odd but who am I to quibble with a sense of belonging?

Before the match I decided that if Andy Murray defied the odds, I'd offer one of my paid patterns for free. And because Andy won, you can now use the code comeonandy to get Kirkja for free until 6pm GMT tonight.

Almost 1250 people have snapped up Kirkja in the last 19 hours. Do join them! Maybe even dip into the Karie Bookish group and show off your Kirkja shawl once you've knitted it!

An aside: I like this photo a lot. I didn't use it as a pattern photo for various reasons, but I like it a great deal. It looks like me - and I cannot begin to tell you how much that means to me. Modelling my patterns is one of my least favourite activities. I feel very conscious of the way I look and how far I am from the standard 'model look'. Ravelry is a great place for showcasing different body types, but I still dislike the way I look in photos. I note all my flaws and imperfections before I look at how the knitting looks. It feels awful, just awful. So, it's a big thing for me to say that I like a photo.

That was a bit of an aside!

The rest of today will be used on sprucing up the website (have you noticed the new layout?) and on getting the next Doggerland pattern sorted. If you are one of the Kirkja downloaders, do stick around. Plenty of exciting things happening!

Snapdragons & Marigolds

Can I be honest with you? I have days where I just want to give up on this designing malarky. Numbers don't add up, charts don't work, and words fall out of patterns. I have had one of those days today when designing just sucks and I want to kill it all with fire. Tomorrow is another day, to quote Scarlett, but today is just awful.

And it's okay to have days like that, I think. The key is to just persevere and learn from them. I know from my network of fellow designers and other creatives that we all have days like this. The important thing to remember is that not every day is as frustrating as today. Most days are good and I even have the occasional great day when I'm on fire.

So I went to knit in the park when my brain gave up and everything came rushing in. I went to the park with my sample knitting and my new Chiaogoo needles (they are wonderful - I am going to slowly upgrade my needle toolbox with Chiaogoos). Snapdragons and marigolds surrounded me and the sun peeped out occasionally.

Mental health break.

And I don't think I actually give myself enough breaks.

Snapdragons and marigolds should not feel this special - they should form part of my every day life (along with checking emails, eating lunch and drawing charts).  I need to look into an actual, real break soon because I am supposed to be on holiday right now and .. I am not.

Tonight I'm going to grab Mr Bookish and we are going to go for a walk. Charts, numbers and words will have to wait until tomorrow. I have flowers to show him.

PS. I'm currently looking for a sample knitter for a very small project. Read more here and send me a Private Message on Ravelry if you are interested.