A Very Big Thank You ...

... to all my wonderful customers at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show last Sunday. A big thank you to Kate and Diana, the totally brilliant organisers. You girls rock! It was great! I had a super day meeting lots of charming yarnie folk. I had a ball chatting and joking with Marcia from Yarnsulike, my lovely neighbour, on the next-door stand. We had fun, we had snow and we had the Sockmatician. What more could a yarnaholic want on a cold, dark Sunday in the middle of January?

All the best for now my lovelies,

Bonny x

🍒 Cherries ...

It's becoming a bit of a habit: first carrots, now cherries! I'm (health) food obsessed at the moment. With cold, grey weather outside it's a relief to have something colourful to play with inside.

As with the carrots I'm using our own label Costa Brava Organic Cotton in 4 ply. My colour-ways are Pillarbox (red) for the cherries, and Green Bean for the stems.

If you'd like to get started on a fruit bowl of your own, just carry on for the pattern.

🥕 A perfect orange carrot: one of your 5-a-day 🥕

Long story short: I was staring idly at my stock of 4 ply wool thinking that I should make up a few unusual pieces to bring along to the wonderful WAWS Wool Show. The Tangerine Orange colour-way whispered carrot to me rather than tangerine. And a fun 40 minutes later a funky carrot was born.

Mr B,  who is at heart a very practical sort, wondered vaguely what anyone would do with a knitted carrot; he didn't reckon it would work in a casserole. Emi thought it looked prettier than a flower, which was nice, but still didn't quite answer the question.

I made another carrot, and thought about why anyone would need a knitted carrot ...

I'm using these ones to embellish some wire baskets that will hold balls of wool at the fair. So continuing with that decorative theme, I reckon that, if you slipped a tiny fridge magnet inside the back seam as you sew it up, the force of the magnet would work through the 4 ply fabric and you'd have a pretty nifty fridge magnet. I'm not an Amazon seller, but if you log on you can buy packs of 25 mini-magnets for about a fiver. Or, if you've got a plain tote bag for going to the market, a bunch of carrots would make a lovely embellishment. Heck, you could fix it with a safety pin to your lapel and call it jewellery! Mr B especially liked that explanation as it would cost a great deal less than what I normally call jewellery ...

So now that we've got that all cleared up, just read on for the pattern ...

New Model Sock ...

I've been working on my basic sock pattern, and I've made a few tweaks: I've introduced Kitchener toes and Dutch heels.

You can find my other sock patterns here: snuggly socks and here: spring into summer socks.

And to knit these socks I've used 4 ply sock wool (80% superwash merino, 20% nylon) that I dyed using logwood chips. You can read more about my logwood dye vat here: All the Purples.

Succumbing to the C-Word ...

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas ... We've even had five flakes of snow in London today!

I know. I know. It's still November. But if I can just hold my nerve for another day we'll be there: December with Christmas (almost) the next stop.

December is a busy month for me. I've got our wedding anniversary, Emi, my son's birthday and my husband's birthday as well as Christmas and trips back to the family in Ireland to fit in. And, of course, I've not done nearly enough preparation for any of it. Crazy days.

To distract me from the madness that is almost upon me I've worked up a new pattern for a mid-sized project bag. I've got one made up, and a few more cut out and ready to sew.

Ivy Leaves

My friends, after beavering around in my garden, and brandishing my garden secateurs with malice, I give you Ivy Leaf Yellow, which is really a muted, slightly acid-green. It's an odd colour, but I like it.

All the purples ...

This week I've had a lot of fun using logwood chips to create a dye-bath that's given me a lush spectrum running from inky purples to airy lavenders as it has gradually lost its strength. I've been playing with it for several days now, allowing each hank of wool time to absorb its fill of the dye before mordanting another hank, and dropping it into the bath.

Logwood Dye

And a big thank you ...

... to all my lovely customers at Festiwool.

It was a fabulous friendly fair, showcasing lots of marvellous yarns and yarn-related knick-knacks. I had a super day, and I hope everyone else did too.

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Festiwool 2017

Looking forward to Festiwool this Saturday, 11th November from 10:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Priory School, Bedford Road, Hitchin, SG5 2UR. Hope to see you there!

Channelling your inner avocado ...

Remember back in the day when anyone mentioned avocado in the context of colour and it summoned up images of drab, sludge-green bathrooms from the 1970s? Well, for me, those days are very firmly yesterdays. Now when anyone mentions avocado I start to channel visions of warm apricots, dusty salmon pinks and rose-tinted light browns.

No, I'm not dropping acid. Honest, guvnor.

This is what happens when you use your discarded avocado skins and stones to make a dye bath. And let's face it, with the current vogue for mashed avocado on toast with optional chilli flakes for heat, most of us have plenty of skins and stones that are destined for nothing loftier than the compost bin.

Well, hold onto your re-cycling for just a moment: you've got the makings of the very easiest and most environmentally friendly dye bath since the invention of the colour wheel. The thing is there's enough tannin in them there stones to act as a natural mordant to make the colour attach to the fibre so you don't need to go messing with any nasty chemicals that might go on to pollute the water table.

Dyeing to tell ...

I've been having so much fun. The autumn sunshine has added unexpected joy to the season here in London. And a couple of life-enhancing changes have recently overtaken me, which have also added to my little quota of joy and happiness.

Dealing with a burgeoning yarn stash?

Many of us yarn-aholics have an enduring, perennial problem in the storage department. Our stash has a tendency to grow quicker than our capacity to consume it by turning it into gorgeous hand-knits.

It's a complaint that I hear again and again on the knitting holiday circuit. My guests all seem to have the same nagging problem: cupboards and closets that were not designed to accommodate the outsized proportions of their stash. And, given my own line of business, I've got a yarn stash that would fill a small room.

So, what are we to do?

Well, if you've got stuff that you know you're not going to get to for a while, I may have an answer for you: vacuum storage bags. You can buy them on Ebay from 99p a pop.

Just lay all your yarn out nice and tidy inside the bag. You'll have a deliciously fat, squidgy parcel to start off with.

London Bridge Sheep Drive and the Pop-up Wool Fair

I'd like to say a big thank you to all my lovely customers from Sunday past, who came along to the pop-up wool fair that popped up for the London Bridge Sheep Drive. The sun shone, the sheep were driven, and everyone had a ball.

Way back in medieval times the Grant of the Freedom of the City of London was a right allowing individuals to carry on a trade within the city. They would have taken the grant, and joined one of the trade guilds that flourished in ye olde London towne. The right to drive livestock across the bridges into the old city without paying tolls was an important privilege that came with the Freeman's grant. And it's a right that is still practised every September, but now the Freemen receive their grants as a civic honour in recognition of outstanding achievement and the event raises money for charity.

Toddler's cardigan - age 3

It's taken me the longest time to get this little cardigan off the needles - and then to get the pattern written up. I started work on it way, way back in May, and I really struggled to get it finished on time for Fibre East at the end of July. Here we are in the middle of September, and I'm only now managing to write up the pattern. There's been an awful lot of procrastination going on at this end. The truth is that I've spent all summer playing a form of tennis called Padel. I've had classes with the loveliest and most patient of instructors, and I've been out on court practising my shots every chance I've got. It's been more than slightly addictive. Anyone who came to visit me this summer has HAD to play Padel. No ifs no buts no coconuts - it's been down to the Padel court at every opportunity. And as a consequence all the patterns and knitting and stuff that normally occupies my time has ground to a halt.

Anyway back to the project in hand.  It's knit in our own-label Costa Brava Knitting 4 ply cotton, working in 2 colours: Post Box (red) and Tangerine (orange) using 3.25 mm needles (US size 3/ UK/Canadian size 10). It knits in stocking stitch to a tension of  [23 stitches x 32 rows] on a 10 cm x 10 cm square. I've taken my sizing from Ralph Lauren size 3T, and knit the jumper to match. You'll need around 150 g of wool to knit this size - 100 g of Post Box and 50 g of Tangerine.

Fibre East Tomorrow ... see you there!

We're off to Fibre East tomorrow. You can find us in the Leicester Marquee. We've got our fingers crossed for nice weather.

Emi's made a Lego sewing machine to bring me luck and celebrate all the sewing I've been doing recently.

Hope to see you there!

Bonny x

How to knit perfect stripes

The problem with knitting stripes in the round ...

Have you found when you're knitting in the round that it's almost impossible to get your stripes to match up perfectly? 

I think the technical term for the problem is jogging. The stripes tend to jog on a little on their own, so that they never perfectly encircle the work. At the root of the problem is the fact that knitting in the round is really knitting in a spiral. You don't stop and join the first to the last stitch at the end of a row. No, you carry on, slipping effortlessly up onto the next row. It's a spiral that you're making, not a series of perfect circles.  This is all fine and dandy if you're knitting with one colour, but it is irksome if you're trying to do neat, clean stripes with a beginning and an end that meet tidily. Perfectly joined stripes never happen naturally, and it's impossible to make the issue disappear completely, but there are a couple of things you can do to mask the problem.

A stripe that "jogs" out of its proper alignment when knit in the round

How to save dropped stitches in stocking stitch ...

Back in May one of my guests asked if I could show her how to rectify the situation when a stitch gets dropped. The technique varies depending on what type of stitch you're working at the time.

Part A below deals with how to fix a dropped stitch on a knit row, and Part B deals with a purl row fix-up.

A: Knit row fix-up in stocking stitch

So here's what we start off with:

Dropped Knit Stitch working in Stocking Stitch

1. Slip a stitch-holder - or a safety pin - through the dropped stitch so that it won't unravel any further.


2. Slip stitches, without twisting them, from your right needle to your left needle until you get to the dropped stitch.

1. Save dropped stitch with a stitch-holder or safety pin
2. Slip stitches to get to the dropped stitch

3. Slip a spare needle that's slightly thinner than the needles you've been working on into the dropped stitch from front to back as shown in the photo below. I like to use a thinner needle than I've been working on as this tends to pull the tension of the repaired stitches slightly tighter. I find this to be helpful as repaired stitches are often a little looser in tension than the stitches around them.

4. Slip the back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch onto the inserted needle as well. Make sure that you've got the correct back-bar, because if you use the one above or below by mistake the work will pucker.

4. Slip needle under back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch

5. Using the left needle, draw the dropped stitch over the back bar on the inserted needle.

5. Slip dropped stitch over backbar using left needle

6. Slip the saved stitch back onto the left needle or carry on up the ladder of dropped stitches if there is more than one row of them, repeating steps 2 to 5 until all the dropped stitches have been saved up the row.

Work up the ladder of dropped stitches until you reach the top

B: Purl row fix-up working stocking stitch

Now I'll be totally honest here: if I find a dropped stitch on a purl row, I simply turn the work around and fix it as though it were a knit stitch. Fixing knit stitches is easier than fixing purl stitches, so why make life more difficult than you need to?

But if, for whatever reason, you want to fix it purl-wise, this is how to do it:

1. Stop your dropped stitch from unravelling any further by securing it with a stitch holder or a safety pin.

2. Slip stitches from the right needle to the left needle until you reach the dropped stitch.

 3. Make sure that the back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch is sitting in front of the dropped stitch (see photo below). As was the case on our knit row fix-up, if you chose the wrong back bar the work will pucker.

4. Use a spare needle that is a size or two smaller than you're working on.  Insert the needle into the dropped stitch from the back to the front as shown below.

5. Insert the left needle into the dropped stitch from front to back, and draw it over the back bar.

6. Pull the back bar through the dropped stitch to replace the lost stitch that had previously been there.

7. Place the saved stitch back on the left needle, or work your way up the ladder of dropped stitches if there are rows of dropped stitches until you've saved them all. Between each step of the ladder you will have to slip the saved stitch off the inserted needle in order to move the corresponding back bar to the front it i.e. to the position shown in the photo below step 4 above.  Just slip the saved stitch off, hold it between your forefinger and thumb and lift the back bar over the top of the stitch so that it sits as shown in the photo.

You may find that the tension along the ladder of saved stitches is a little too loose when you're done. Don't worry too much about this. As you knit on it will automatically go some way towards correcting itself, and if it's still obvious by the time you're done you can wash your knitting and leave it to dry. When it's dry you'll find that the tension has sorted itself out. The process of washing and drying can correct any number of tension anomalies in your work.

All the best for now and happy knitting!

Bonny x

How to tailor your tassel ...

Gosh that title sounds a bit dodgy ... but I'll bet it grabbed your attention 👀

The purpose of this strangely-named post is to explain how to make luscious tassels. Let's be honest, there's nothing quite so under-whelming as a half-hearted tassel. You might as well just not bother if you're going to put some limp, skinny, under-weight effort on the fringe of whatever it is you're trying to embellish. Save the wool, and do something else! Sew on feathers, or add some sequins. Do something else, because tassels should be opulent and extravagant. They have to be full-bodied and curvaceous to be tassel-tastic!

On my recent Queen of Hearts Stole I chose to go a bit overboard with some really lux tassels. I used over 80 g of wool making 30 tassels to sew on either end. It was very extravagant as I'd only used 540 g to knit the entire stole, but the investment really upped the wow factor of the finished item.

Queen of Hearts Summer Stole

I'm an optimist at heart. I believe that summer will finally come, although looking out at the hail showers today you'd be forgiven for not keeping the faith. Still, even when it does show up, it's got this habit of not always staying constant to its billing here in the UK. Without too much notice it can turn on a sixpence and go all chilly and grey-skied.

So a wrap of some sort or other is a pretty useful addition to any girl's summer wardrobe, and ta-dah! - I give you mine:

 It's knit in our own-label Costa Brava merino double knitting yarn in Buttered Caramel. For a scarf (including tassels) with a finished length of 194 cm/ 76" and a width of 40 cm/ 16" I used 620 g/ 1240 metres of yarn. This gave me a tension, working in pattern over the length and width of the stole, of 30 stitches x 28 rows for a 10 cm x 10 cm square.

 Just read on for the pattern:

Teddy Bears with waistcoats ... 🐻

Here in the UK our clocks have moved on to British Summer Time. Personally I wish they stayed on BST all through the winter months. It would be great to have that extra daylight into the winter months. The sun is shining down here in London, the mercury has risen and the spring bulbs are bringing bursts of colour everywhere.

In the meantime I've been busy getting a project ready for the lovely ladies who are going to be my guests in Barcelona over Easter. I'm so very excited to be hosting them in one of the greatest cities in the world.

We're going to be working on some Barcelona Bears as our holiday project. This pattern had its first incarnation to celebrate the wonderful one-day wool fair that is Festiwool back in the autumn, but it's making a come-back with a splendid new spring waistcoat to keep the bear warm in this chilly weather.

I've shared the knitting pattern here: Festibear, and if you'd like to learn how to make his waistcoat just read on for my paper pattern and instructions.