Knitting at Port Eliot was huge fun again this year. So much so that I barely strayed far from the tent thus completely missing the Graffiti Grannys yarn bombed tree, but thankfully the well-trained Kayaker caught up with it and gave it a hug on my behalf...
Everyone seemed to enjoy the relaxing combination of knitting whilst listening and conversing with the authors in the tent, and a last minute and very fortuitous contact with Kaffe Fassett studio manager Brandon Mably gave me a contact at Rowan Yarns who very kindly sponsored us to the tune of a generous amount of wool. Thanks are also due to Rosie at Bridport Yarn in Dorset, a small shop with a huge heart, who sent us a basketful of very beautiful Noro...
It was lovely to meet so many different knitters in the tent and also to witness my first proper sighting of Scandinavian knitting. For those who don't know this is a completely different style of knitting to my own very ploddy and ungainly peasant method (needled tucked under arms, laborious wool-over technique via right hand). An hour of knitting whilst listening and the Scandinavian knitter had produced this..
A traditional Nordic baby scarf and a thing of such simple beauty that I am still marvelling at it. It's all about feeding the wool via the left hand and index finger rather than the right, and then somehow flicking it effortlessly and at lightning speed over the needles. I need to learn this.
No sooner was all that over than the Olympics were upon us and I quickly realised that the road to intolerable stress and over-excited insanity would be to sit and chew my nails through all this with no knitting on the go.
Except what to knit??
In the end I settled on some sample squares using stitch patterns with an element of complexity that might somehow come together into something, who knows what, but which would forever remind me of this wonderful, amazing and truly memorable fortnight. This is the state of the table that divides me from the TV..
But I have also had this pile of books awaiting my undivided attention and huge thanks to Brandon Mably for arranging for these to be sent my way from the Kaffe Fassett studio.
I am desperate to pore over the quilt books in the wake of the little quiltsuke I made for several of the guests in the dovegreyreader tent this year... tiny hand quilted homages to Kaffe's colour palette.
But in keeping with my current role as tricoteuse to Team GB this is the one I am focussing on...
A couple of my squares perching a bit cheekily there, but just wait until you see the treasures in waiting inside this one. Colour Guys thank you, this is a stunning book and I hardly know where to begin, but I think it might be with the deceptively simple but oh so very clever diagonal scarf.
Right must dash... we have just won a gold in the Dressage and I am now a complete expert on passages, half passes and piaffes, and the Cycling beckons where I need to brush up on my Omnium and gain the Cycle-ogical advantage (that was Bookhound's pun I can't take the credit).
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