...finding comfort in a familiar craft.

Back in the mists of time (early 2000s) I used to knit a lot. A LOT. I have the RSI and drawers full of stashed yarn to prove it. I stopped for a while partly becasue the boy grew up and I had no more karate lessons, drum lessons, etc to pass the time through, partly due to the RSI, but mainly because I became newly obsessed with making pots!

Lately though I started to notice my eye lingering on my knitting books bookshelf again. I found myself deep in some drawers of yarn thinking about how I really should use it, and how comforting I’d find the repetetive movement of “yarn over needle and pull it through the loop” especially in these trying times. I always found knitting calming and soothing, and I can choose a pattern as easy or challenging as I like. Sometimes no pattern at all - which is the joy of having learned a thing to a stage of resonable competence.

I am quite happy to just leaf through a knitting book for a while, if I’m honest. I mean who couldn’t find a 1980s Kaffe Fasset book of huge colourful garments a joy, the colours, the shapes (also the perms, which I was never allowed to have, thanks Mum in retrospect). There was a lot of bad stuff going on in the eighties of course, including a president of the USA who we all thought was ummm….a bit mad? Maybe that’s why it sprang off the shelf into my hand, the vibe. But I remember that even under the threat of nuclear armageddon - and believe me we were scared - people continued to make beautiful things. I think we must.

Make it stand out

From Kaffe Fasset, Glorious Knitting in 1985, and it still is (glorious I mean).

However I decided against a giant cardigan, and instead went to Ravelry (a big knitterly rabbit hole of a website) to find the Melt The ICE hat pattern. I wanted to support the campaign from here in the UK, and I got knit a hat in some red yarn I already owned. It was a great little project, it’ll come in handy for some future protesting I’m sure.

With my knitting neurons fired up, and a bit of a stash delve done I looked though the books for something that would suit this slightly strange French yarn I’d found, a blend of acrylic and hemp. I’d definitely tried to make something with it before because there were at least three balls of it frogged in the plastic bag with the unused ones. What could it become, it is drapey, in a spring/summer pale green, and knits up on reasonably small needles. Did I hear it whispering “écharpe d’été légère” very quietly? I decided I did. A lace shawl then.

And here is Kate Davies “The West Highland Way” to the rescue. I have so many of Kate’s books. From roughly the early 2000s knitting books began to include essays and beautiful photography as well as patterns, growing out of the essays and beautiful photography on the many knitting blogs back then. Kate’s designs, rooted in the mainly Scottish/Shetland tradition as they are, are pretty timeless and always a pleasure to make. She’s an excellent pattern writer, even the difficult stuff is made very clear.

I chose ‘The Observatory’ which was just enough lace to make it spicy and it was about the right gauge. I started off, I realised I needed to sit on the floor to knit otherwise my shoulders felt wrong so I get the extra exercise of getting up and down, which can only be good for my 58 year old bones, despite the groaning involved.

Blocking it out, a thing you do to lace. Yes that s a functioning spinning wheel in the background.

I made pretty speedy progress through this - 6 hours, i.e. season 2 of ‘The Capture’ and a couple more - despite having some kind of glitch on every row 18 (there’s a repeat pattern) which was completely down to me, and having to undo my work almost every time. But that’s never bothered me. I’m a lover of the process of things -as well as the finished thing.

Knitting while the world goes mad

A Magical Place, on a Pot