High Summer Makes

It's a strange experience knitting with wool on the Costa Brava in hot, steamy August, and then trying on your knitted whatsit, in the bright sunshine, all kitted out in your bathers. I'd say it's a bit surreal, but autumn is coming, and I know I'll be very grateful for my woolly whatsits in the fullness of time and in the depths of the autumn chills. That said my fingerless gloves with bikini combo was downright weird.

My neighbours think I'm a bit strange. Everyone else is lounging by the pool, or soaking up the rays on the beach or fingering their way through a dog-eared paperback whilst wallowing in the shallows. I'm reclining in the cool of the shade having a party all of my own, knitting and sewing with headphones on listening to "The Prisoners of Geography", an interesting take on geopolitics, and how everything is the shape it is because of geography. This is the life!

I've been working on a design for my guests in October. Our project is going to be all about colour-work. This autumn I've got big ambitions to design a Fair Isle jumper that will channel my inner land girl from the 1940s. I'm thinking of lots of autumn golds and russets and browns; fiery earth colours.

Here's my project palate, which is all 4 ply merino that I've dyed myself from natural dyes.

I've found a great pattern book by Mary Jane Mucklestone, which is full of colourful inspiration. I've also found a great programme on the internet called StitchFiddle, which is fabulous for designing your own cross stitch and Fair Isle patterns. I had been using another quite expensive design software (which I won't name in case they sue me), but I think StitchFiddle is much better. The other (nameless) software kept needing upgrades, for which you needed to remember a lot of abstract details from when you subscribed, which made the whole process feel like it was just too much trouble to be bothered with.

I've stitched together a little cushion from the last cactus design that I stitched, and its been trimmed  with a really joyful turquoise trim. If the WonderDog were a better behaved animal I would use it as a scatter cushion on the sofa, but, despite being five years of age, the WonderDog still likes to chew things with the result that much of what I possess has frayed edges and comes emblazoned with teeth marks.

I found a lovely suedette/ faux suede upholstery-weight fabric on-line in the Yorkshire Fabric Shop, which I've used as a backing. They send out samples before you commit to purchase a serious length of anything. In fact I used the sample that they sent to back a couple of the little key-rings (also photographed above). It's a really opulent, chic fabric and I've got big plans for a whole set of cactus-inspired cross stitch cushions all backed in this marvelous faux suede.

I'm tempted to swap cacti for boats as my go-to design fetish. Down in the town they've decorated the streets for summer. One street is shaded by the most colourful parasols ever, all suspended in the air. Another has an armada of little boat kites, which bob up and down with the wind.

Anyway, Happy Friday, and all the best for the weekend,

Bonny x

What the Dickens ?

The other day we trooped along to the Espai Carmen Thyssen in the Monastery here in (very) sunny Sant Feliu. We love our monastery, and support all the events that they host there. Every year the lovely Baroness Thyssen brings a selection of paintings out of the Thyssen vaults for a specially curated exhibition - just for us. These exhibitions take a theme and use the art from their extensive collection to narrate and explore it. One year they chose the exploration of the West (think USA), and told that story from a Spanish perspective, which was really interesting for someone brought up with an English-speaker's bias, who had always thought in terms of her cousins across the pond. This year the theme is the evolution of landscape painting, which is also interesting in its own right, and includes a healthy amount of local art.

Having looked around the landscape exhibition one of the attendants told us to pop upstairs to the Pepa Poch exhibition. I'll be honest: I'd never heard of Pepa Poch before.

Knitting on the Bias - a short guide to everything you need to know ...

What could be nicer for late summer or early autumn than a swishy scarf, knit on the bias for extra swing? - Something just perfect for wrapping up a little in the evenings when the sun sinks, and things start to cool down just a little.

Read on for our all-you-need-to-know guide and pattern for creating a great patchwork scarf knit in triangles to devour left-over yarn from your stash.

Woolly All Sorts

Gosh it feels like it's been a very l-o-n-g hot summer, and we're only just into August. My garden has taken on a sub-Saharan vibe. Parched would just about sum things up right now, and with the mercury pushing up into the 30s here in London it's been hard to muster huge enthusiasm for all things woolly.

But I have been playing with some neutral dye baths to make contrasts so that my brighter colours will pop. I'd saved up a huge consignment of dried onion skins, avocado skins and stones and pomegranate skins that went into the pot last week. I added a little turmeric for golden sunshine, and came up with a very pleasing Hermes mustard yellow. And just as the bath was beginning to weaken I brewed up some walnut shells and threw them into the mix,  turning my mustard yellow into a warm, unctuous chocolate meets golden treacle colour. Would you believe me if I said I was on a strict no-sugar/ no starch diet? 😶

Anyway, banishing all thoughts of forbidden delights like sticky toffee pudding, chocolate ganache and the like ... here's what I came up with:

Super Easy Curly Wurly Scarf

Are you looking for an easy, lazy knit for working on in the shade of a parasol during this glorious heat-wave? Well, I may just have the thing for you.

I recently put this pattern together for my lovely guests on the Spring Colours tour to the sunny Costa Brava. Knit with our own, double knitting weight variegated bamboo yarn, there's enough interest in the colour work of they yarn to sustain a fairly simple pattern. It made for a relaxed project for guests to work on without having to think too much about what came next, which was all the better for shooting the breeze and chilling out.

It's a really, really easy knit, worked in double knitting on 3.75 mm needles (UK size 9, US size 5). In garter stitch it knits to a tension of 20 stitches x 30 rows for a 10 cm square. To make a scarf that measures a very generous 158 cm you will need 3 balls of 50 g bamboo.

Ivy leaf wool wash

OK ... you're thinking. She's finally lost the plot. The sun has addled her brain.

But bear with me. There's been a lot written across the internet recently about how you can use ivy leaves as a wool detergent. With all this warm weather I don't have much need of my woollies, so it seemed the perfect time to get things laundered and try out this crazy idea.

I went off into the wilder reaches of the garden and gathered myself a big bowl of ivy leaves, which I washed under the tap to rid them of their cobwebs and dust. Next I tied the leaves in an old T-towel so that they wouldn't escape and mess around with the inner workings of my washing machine. I placed my trial woolly jumper in a mesh wash bag, and placed it in the machine along with the bundle of leaves and popped them on the wool-wash cycle.

Happy Hens ...

A big "thank you" to the lovely hens I hosted earlier in the week for a crafting hen party. It was hot, it was sunny and there were cacti everywhere!

We made bags, we made key fobs, we knit a scarf - for some of us, it was a first scarf ever. Hope the big day is everything you dreamed of, Amelia, and all the best for a crafty ever-after,

Bonny x

Provisional cast-on - crochet methods

I was recently asked to demonstrate how I went about doing a provisional cast-on. I have 2 methods, both using a simple crochet chain, and, truth be told, they amount to pretty much the same thing. The cast-on in crochet is essentially a disposable beginning, which in both cases can be ripped back to expose a second line of live stitches so that you can do a knit-down finishing or some other join in your knitting.

Lazy summer evenings ...

Sometimes in the middle of London on a balmy summer evening it's hard to believe that you're in the metropolis. Those precious pockets of green that are so liberally dispersed across the city have a way of lulling you into believing that you're somewhere else - somewhere peaceful and calm and serene. This was Ealing Common the other evening as the WonderDog and I were going for a postprandial stroll. If you closed your ears to the roar of traffic on the A406, you could almost believe you were in the countryside.

All the best,

Bonny x

Hagseed and Cacti

My homage to the cactus is born of the fact that it's the only houseplant that I can reliably grow. I'm so not a houseplant person: I totally lack the constancy. I'm here today, gone tomorrow and when I get back a few days after that every plant in the house has given up the ghost and gone off to live in the great green plant heaven of the ever-after. Every plant that is with the exception of my valiant cacti. Cacti and I can be relied upon to get along splendidly together. They generally survive and flourish in the barren desert of my care regime.

Sew Sunday ...

I'm enjoying a lot of peace and quiet at the moment, perhaps rather more peace and quiet than I'm totally comfortable with. By some strange alignment of the stars Mr B and the child are both away: Mr B is the Far East with work, and Emi is in Wales on a geography trip. So it's just me and the WonderDog holding the fort.

I enjoyed it enormously for the first day or two. Whaow! I got so much done ... but now I'm finding excuses to go and visit people. I've had enough of my own company.

On Sunday we had a glorious day here in London: all blue skies and sunshine. I devoted my afternoon to sewing peacefully on the terrace.

Iced T

I've come over all summery: my drink of choice in these balmy days of early summer is iced tea. I'm normally a builder's brew type of girl, who occasionally pushes the boat out with an exotic cardamon tea from the Turkish grocery shop. But these days I'm brewing tisanes to chill in the fridge and serve over ice in tall glasses.

A big "thank you" ...

... to the lovely guests who came for our May Spring Colours holiday. Come rain or come shine, you were terrific!

Hey Duckie ...

I've been meaning to write up the pattern for this little guy for a-g-e-s, and with one thing and another I have procrastinated so that he's remained an undocumented doodle in my notebook.

Anyway, here he sharing his spring-time glory with the buttercups.

If you'd like to make him, just read on for the pattern.

Horse Chestnuts in May

Right now I am in thrall to the horse chestnut trees. All across West London they are in bloom, and the air is heavy with their scent. They are life-affirmingly gorgeous - unless of course you suffer from hay fever, in which case you'd probably vote to have them all chopped down overnight.