News round up for May 2017

Someone asked me if I have a newsletter and I thought no I don’t but perhaps I could try having one. At least that way I might post more regularly.

So, I had an article published in Vogue Knitting, about Sanquhar gloves. I felt extremely honoured to be invited to do this and very much enjoyed doing it, especially going to visit Sanquhar again, staying at the Blackaddie and meeting fellow glove knitter, May McCormick.

Here’s the cover and the first page of the piece:

I’ve restarted knitting gloves for friends and so I’ve been sampling and designing for my friends Nick and Jenny.  Nick is a musician and he chose the vintage Sanquhar colours of brown and yellow. These are the cuffs so far:

I have also opened a glove knitting Instagram account where you can find me as Angharadt. The pics are the same as what’s here though.

My work got retuned from the Make exhibition at Ruthin Craft Centre after a lot of kerfuffle with the post office or Royal Mail. It turned out they were just trying to be helpful but t seemed as though the parcel had gone astray for a few hours.

Finally, I write this from Latvia where I am attending a mitten knitting retreat. It is the last evening of a packed week in which we have seen other places than Riga, being based inThe southern city of Liepaja. We have seen more mittens than I would have thought possible and met more knitters ditto. I have tried techniques I’ve not even heard of and been to places I didn’t know existed. I’ll leave you with a picture of the Russian Orthodox cathedral here, the nearest I’m likely to get to the Kremlin.

More on Estonian Craft Camp

Well, after the first two days we had a day out. I had chosen to go to Parnu, a town on the Baltic coast. It was about an hour or so on a coach through quiet roads and lovely agricultural countryside. We were taken round the local museum and then went to look at crafts in the local shops. The weather was windy and not too warm so I headed off to the beach as I hadn’t seen the Baltic. Also, the museum had pictures of the beaches from the days when Parnu was a resort used by the Soviet authorities for the workers to have holidays. When Indira Ghandi visited Parnu, which must have been before 1984 when she was assasinated,  a wooden elephant was put in the sea, which is still there. It also doubles as a slide. It’s almost life size and looks bizarre and so smart that it must be renewed and repainted. Here it is in the unseasonably choppy waves:

I also bought some gloves in the local Modern Art Museum. They are beautifully knitted and very fine but I haven’t taken any pictures yet.

Back at Craft Camp we had two more days of workshops. I did a day of bone work, in which I made four bone needles and a second day of knitting in which we learnt about blue and white mittens and gloves, and started a pair of them. Here’s the bone needles, of which I am very pleased. It’s an example of it being easier to learn to do something that you know nothing about as the steep learning curve is always very satisfying.