I’ve been knitting lots lateley. I love the repetitive motion with my fingers. I love the exciting way I can put different colours next to each other & see how they react. I love how you can start off intending to make one thing, then while you’re knitting you can decide that it’s going to be something else, then turn out to be completelly different to all the other ideas you had along the way!
Tha’t what’s going on with this that I’m knitting at the moment.
First of all it was going to be a waistcoat. Then I realized I’d forgotten to make armhole shapes so decided to turn it into a very rectanglular tanktoppy thing. Then I thought that might look a bit funny so I unravelled a couple of inches & extended out a bit to make short arms. Then I decided I didn’t like the look of that either so i unravelled a few inches again & extended by a short way to make tiny little sleeves. not really sleeves even, just slightly sticking-out bits! Not sure how this is going to look but I suppose there’s only one way to find out! This all started off because last Christmas my Mum gave me the most gorjeous mottled pinky bluey purpley wool which was a mix of silk, alpaca & merino… hmmmmmmm… To have something made entirely out of this wouldn’t look too good in my opinion & there wasn’t enough anyway so I decided to put wide stripes of it amongst lots of other colours. Here’s some of what I’ve done so far:

here's one side

& here's the other side

Now here’s one of the dolls i made recently & decided i can’t sell as I like her too much! It’s from a doodle I drew YEARS ago of a lady I decided was out shopping for seaweed.

lady shopping for seaweed

here you can see her hair a bit better

she’s made from some wonderful old fabric from the 40’s or 50’s which I’ve stitched seaweedish patterns onto.

Now here’s an image of Karen Howse’s, the loveley lady I mentioned in my last blog.

Green Tree (detail)

Finally for now (i’m supposed to be getting ready to go out on my ”library ladies lunch day out”) here’s part of some of my most recent collagey attempts:

this is just a psrt of the picture as my scanner's only A4.

At the ‘SHINE’ Fair at Trelowarren last weekend I met a really loveley lady called Karen Howse who was demonstrating with her beautiful stitching. Her website is www.karenhowse.co.uk & is well worth a visit. I really love how she draws with her stitching. She has a wonderful free style, her love of her subject matter really comes through in her work.
I’m now the proud owner of one of her sumptuous embroidered bangles & three-stranded necklaces.