On February 11th at 6pm GMT I am extremely proud to be giving the inaugural lecture for the @centerforknitandcrochet, a membership organisation in the States. It is free for members of the CKC, which costs $10 to join. I will share some reflections on my knitting life and particularly my glove knitting. Please join me and the CKC for this online event. Details are on the CKC web site and also the Knitting & Crochet Guild web site:
A Knitter’s Guide to Gloves
My book, A Knitter’s Guide to Gloves, is published by the Crowood Press.
It’s available from the Crowood Press directly
Do go and have a look! and buy!
Angharad
Still around
You would be forgiven in thinking that knitting gloves and the glove knitter had gone into hibernation but this is not actually true … so I am still researching, designing and knitting gloves.
Unfortunately, most of what I do is for clients and has to be kept under wraps while I’m working on it.
But do keep an eye on my Instagram for occasional posts. I’m @angharadt over there
A glove video
Last May (!) I gave away many of the gloves I have knitted for my friends. One of them, Frank Abbott, is an artist and filmaker and this is the video he made:
Season’s greetings
This is a very occasional blog, with no regular posts at all in the last year or so. However, if you do happen to come by this way at all, please have a browse around and find out a bit about my glove knitting activities.
These are focused on research rather than knitting in the last few months. I actually wonder if I’m knitted out as all I do is either on the machine or extremely simple hand knitting.
Season’s greetings to any readers, wherever you might be, or what ever season it is – mostly to create light in the darkest time of the year for us northern Europeans.
The Great Glove Give Away
Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while will know that I justified knitting so many pairs of gloves by starting to knit them for named people. When I began The Glove Project I knitted the Sanquhar patterns and a Yorkshire Dales pair and then some of my own designs. This meant I have enough gloves to last al life time with my initials around the wrist. I hit on the idea of knitting for friends to their choice of colours, initials and dates around the wrists. Going back to 2013 I now have 20 pairs all belonging to different people.
I’ve been planning to give these to their owners for some while, once the Bankfield exhibition was over and then shown at Farfield Mill, it seemed that they should go. It’s taken this long to find a suitable weekend as there are others involved.
I wanted to have photos taken of the gloves, the people and their hands and explored this photography over some months with my friend Geof. We did some test shots and looked at existing images.
Aunt Tilda’s hands, above, is a favourite. This comes from the Center for Knitting and Crochet site here:
http://digital.centerforknitandcrochet.org/items/show/8194
At New Year, another friend got interested while trying on his pair. He is a video artist so now we have videos being made as well as still shots. Here’s a couple of the very quick pics we took then:
It’s all very exciting and a good excuse for a get together.
Watch this space for more!
Estonian knitting March 2019
Places are still available on my Estonian Knitting workshop on Sunday 24th March: details here:
https://www.wildandwoollyshop.co.uk/event/an-introduction-to-estonian-knitting-with-angharad-thomas/
It would be lovely to see you there!
December 2018 newsletter
The beady eyed among you will have realised that even my intentions to write a monthly newsletter have fallen along the wayside … but the road to hell is paved with good intentions ….. so every time I post I have to re-invent why I’m writing, especially if progress is slow on the glove front.
This blog started life as a record of my glove knitting activities, including knitting, researching and designing them. So it still stands as a record of that. As well as knitting gloves I have plenty of other textile interests – knitting things that aren’t gloves and volunteering in the collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild mainly but these are not the main subject of the blog.
I also do quite a lot of hiking, travelling, playing music and seeing friends and family. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in any of this, or at least not very much of it, perhaps some of the travel, so I generally keep those things separate. Sometimes I put them on Facebook especially if Oscar the borrowed dog is involved. He always gets lots of likes.
However, and you can probably tell that I’m arguing with myself here, I think that the main purpose of the blog is glove knitting. It’s mainly for myself I think, although if other people – you – ? – read it than that’s great and I hope that you find it useful and interesting. I know people find it when they are thinking about knitting a pair of patterned gloves and I have had commissions because of it.
I also post on other social media – Instagram and Facebook – but that is also intermittent. I do also try to put my projects on Ravelry, which I like a lot as it is so structured and leaves a detailed record of projects. These are my projects on Ravelry:
https://www.ravelry.com/projects/angharadt?set=&columns=&view=thumbnail&page=&sort=created_&search=
So, here’s the glove knitting news for the last couple of months:
The group of four pairs that I called the Nature series are now more or less complete, rather later than I had planned. They were supposed to be knitted at the rate of a pair a month starting in April which means they should have been complete by the end of July. But that was only an imaginary deadline, not a real one, and without one of those, I find it hard to maintain momentum. Here they are waiting to have their working threads taken out and the ends darned in:
They were lying on the only patch of grass I could find outside our caravan in West Wales where they weren’t being blown around but you wouldn’t know that from the picture.
All the ends are now darned in. Here’s a look at the inside before doing that:
They will need a hot press so that picture will have to come later.
So what do I think of them? Well, I’m a bit pleased, but perhaps not as much as I had hoped … I have a track record of being very self critical of my design work the instant it’s finished … so nothing new here.
What would I change about them? Perhaps another couple of pairs bringing colours together – the ecru and dark grey, perhaps blue and ecru …
What’s worked well ? I think the light brown and ecru pair is the nicest pair I’ve ever designed and knitted. I love the texture in combination with the colour and will use that again, where appropriate.
When they’ve been finally pressed and tidied up I’ll post another picture.
I’m also busy with some machine knitting, some shells and some hand sewing but the project’s a secret so you’ll have to wait until early 2019 to find out about that. Here’s a couple of pictures if you didn’t see them on Instagram.
Work on my chunky knitting machine
And on my trusty Hague linker
Just one more thing for glove and mitten knitting nerds. I found a pattern for mitten thumb shaping that I’d never seen before on the Purl Soho site a day or so ago. They call them ‘Arched Gusset Mittens’ and this is the link here: I think they are rather wonderful and plan to use this shaping as soon as possible. Here’s a little picture of them from Purl Soho:
So that’s all for the moment. Thank you for reading if you’ve got this far.
October newsletter (really what I did in September)
I’ve been travelling again during September and October and not getting half as much knitting done as I’d planned (that’s a surprise).
So the month, September, went like this:
The first week I spent in France and Spain, travelling by train from home, Eurostar to Paris and then daytime TGV to Toulouse. I was certain that this would allow hours of knitting time.
However, I was wrong.
We, that is me and partner, had to get up so early for the first Eurostar that once on it, I slept soundly most of the way, waking up just outside Paris thinking we were in Lille. So no knitting done between London and Paris.
Getting across Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare Montparnasse also proved to be hard work as was queuing for almost an hour on the train at the buffet. It made what we used to call British Rail look absolutely perfect! So not so many undivided hours left there either.
And then I always expect holidays to have endless hours for knitting, preferably sitting in the sun, but somehow, after walks and drinks and meals and talking there’s not that much time left over, especially for stuff that needs attention like two colour gloves. But at least they had their photos taken – here they are, in various stages of completion in the Spanish sun at Bordes de Graus:
You can read more of what Meghann is doing here: https://meghannobrien.com/
I was fortunate to be timetabled to present my paper on the first day which is always a relief. Here I am waving a pair of Sanquhar gloves around.
I had the chance to have a little look around Vancouver which I liked very much. Here’s a little taster: some interiors of a church and a fabulous Art Deco building, views of the harbour, and the hotel where the conference was held, the Sheraton (very posh!).
The final keynote speech was by Charlotte Kwon about her business importing crafts from India, Maiwa. It was absolutely fascinating to hear how she and her team have done this over the last 30 years. Have a look at the web site to see what they have produced in India and how they support the artisans they buy from. It’s inspirational.
The next part of the trip was to California for a family visit and this we (me and partner, Gordon) did this by bus and train. Bus from Vancouver to Seattle, and then sleeper train from Seattle to Oakland, California.
We had a sleeper roomette, as Gordon said, more ‘ette’ than ‘room’ and some great views during the 24 hours on the train. Here’s some of them, urban and rural starting at the very grand station in Seattle and ending with our arrival at Oakland:
So that’s all for now. California happened in October mostly and includes a couple of great wool shops so look out for the next newsletter.
I hope you’ve read this far – if so, thank you!
September newsletter
I think this is a case of better late than never – I nearly didn’t bother because it’s so late in the month.
However, I have been busy knitting, trying to complete the four pairs of gloves I’ve called the Nature Series.
During August I also walked the Yorkshire Three Peaks, visited Wales, went to London and got ready to go to the Pyrenees.
I’m now preparing to go to Vancouver, Canada for the Textile Society of America biannual symposium, for which I have had a paper accepted. It’s about knitted gloves, specifically those knitted in Sanquhar.
I’m going to put in some pictures of all these things and hope to write more for next month.
Here’s the seashore gloves for Rachel: one of them is now complete:
and here’s just a finger on John’s pair: I don’t have a name for this pair but I do like them.
And here’s a thumb being knitted while on the TGV on the way back from the Pyrenees: all the fingers need to be altered as they’ve worked out too small for the would be owner 😦
And so that’s all for now. I do post occasionally on Facebook, more personal things, and on Instagram for knitting things.
Knitting gloves 