A couple of weeks ago, baby E was born to friends of ours, and she’s beautiful. Babies, you will agree, deserve handmade garments more than anyone else in the world, so we looked for the nicest one we could devise.

It had to be Owlet by Kate Davies. This is the baby version of O w l s, from this booklet and as you’d expect from Kate, it’s clever, easy to knit and dotey beyond belief.

We used Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in a sweet dusky pink, so it’s soft as anything and it’ll be easy on Baby E. It washes (even in the machine) and dries fast, so it’ll be easy on Baby E’s parents as well.

We knitted the second size, the one that’s suggested for a nine month old. It has thirteen owls, and that meant…twenty six cute buttony eyes.

Twenty six buttons is a not inconsiderable number, so we started to think: what if there were a way of adding the buttons that didn’t require sewing them in after the fact? It turns out that there is. You can knit the buttons in as you go, and here’s how.

Take a very generous length of your yarn – at least six times the circumference of your Owlet round to be safe – and thread all your buttons onto it, using a yarn needle. (We’re only demonstrating with two, but for the size we knitted, all twenty six were pre-threaded.)

At the beginning of round 14 of the Owls cable chart, drop the working yarn and take up the strand of yarn with the buttons on it. Use that to knit the round.

We placed the buttons on the two eye stitches closest to each other, so there were two stitches between buttons. When you come to an eye stitch, bring the yarn to the front of the work…

…hoosh a button up close to the work…

…slip the next stitch without working it…

…and then bring the yarn back to the rear of the work and work on. You’ll have trapped the button at the front of the work. It’s a good idea to tension the yarn rather firmly here.

Continue all the way around the row, and when you’re finished it, take up the original working yarn again and knit on. You’ll have just four extra ends to weave in, and your owls can watch you contentedly as you finish the jumper.

This technique won’t work for functional buttons, which need to be attached rather more firmly. But any time you want buttons to be a purely decorative element, it will save you a lot of fiddle at the endgame.

So, baby E, you’re only with us a fortnight and already you’re inspiring us to try new things!

In last Tuesday’s post, we mentioned that Jacqui had finished a Cladonia shawl, and we promised to tell you more about it soon. Well, there it is above, and isn’t it lovely? What could be nicer than a little bit of lace in luxury yarn this summer?

Cladonia is designed by Kristin Kapur, and we’re very impressed with it. It’s knitted from the nape of the neck down, using the garter tab cast on that we posted a tutorial for last March. The increases are worked in lines that radiate out from the centre back – you can see them in the picture above, and this gives a lovely semi-circle shape to the shawl.

Most of the pattern is simply stocking stitch: easy to work and a good foil for those lovely increase lines. Then the last 16 rows are lace, so if you’re new to knitting lace shawls, this is a very good pattern to start with. It’s a quick and relaxing knit, with just a sprinkle of spice at the finish. The pattern’s a Ravelry download, and it’s available to purchase instore.

The original pattern is knitted in two colours, but we like Jacqui’s monochrome version just as much. The only other modification was the cast off; like several other knitters, she substituted a picot cast off for the loop cast off in the original.

The yarn for this Cladonia is Skein Queen’s Delectable. It’s a heavy laceweight – almost a sockweight in thickness. It’s got terrific colour saturation, and the silk adds subtle lustre. This shawl used about half a skein, so it’s an economical knit too.

Cladonia, it turns out, is a genus of lichen; hence the post title

We’re always counselled to leave nice long ends for weaving in safely (15cm is a good guideline most of the time). But sometimes we can’t (or don’t). The yarn breaks, we just squeak it to the end of the cast off – there’s lots of reasons for ending up shorter than ideal. Here’s a cunning little trick for dealing with just that situation. You can weave in like this even if your end is shorter than your yarn needle.

The cunning part? Don’t thread the needle. Weave it through the fabric as normal, unthreaded. When you’ve got as far along as the length of your yarn tail, stop.

Now thread the needle with the little bitty end of yarn.

Finally, just pull the needle so that the yarn tail follows it through the fabric, getting woven in as it goes. Ta da! Then you can clip it close to the fabric, though you’ll remember from our post on blocking lace that we prefer to leave the clipping until after the piece has been blocked.

That lovely piece of knitting in the picture is a shawl that Jacqui’s knitting from Skein Queen Delectable. In fact, it’s the second shawl she’s knitting from the one skein, because 700 metres of yarn gives you quite a lot of knitting. More details of both pieces of lace in the fullness of time, of course, but for now, we can be confident that the ends are safe and snug.

So it’s natural to think of Louisa Harding. She does casual elegance like no-one else, and her designs are always interesting to knit. We’ve got two to show you today, in different yarns, but both simple to make and uncomplicated to wear.

First, there’s Hilda, a cardigan to wear all summer, from the Delphine pattern booklet. Delphine‘s a cotton tape yarn which is soft and smooth to the touch and which works up like lightning. The little touches of lace at front and cuffs add interest in that typical Louisa style.

The second garment is one we’ve been admiring for some time. Knitted in 100% cotton Ondine, this is Skipper, from the Ondine booklet.

Just look at how that lovely lazy cable grows out of the ribbing and then moves back into it at the neck – proof, really, that cables are just rib with airs.

Both of these garments would see you through an entire summer of barbecues, days by the lake and evening concerts. That’s how the summer’s going to be. We’ve decided.

Are you passionate about fibre crafts and enthusiastic about sharing your skills with others? Here at This is Knit we’re on the lookout for new teachers and workshop leaders to host classes with us this coming Autumn/Winter.

If you’d like to join us then please contact us with the following details:

Which crafts would you like to teach?

How would you rate your skill level in these crafts?

Do you have teaching experience?

Are you available to teach on evenings and weekends?

Why do you knit / crochet / felt / spin…?

All applications will be reviewed in the next few weeks and we’ll get back in touch with you as soon as possible. Thanks for your interest!

You know how it is: you’re looking round the web, and you find a picture of the perfect lace edging (or garden bench, or veneer effect), and only later realise that you should have noted it down. But you didn’t. Oh dear.

Did you know there’s a place on the web where you can put all those little bits of information? It’s called Pinterest. It’s mostly used for squirrelling images away, but you can also store any sort of information that comes associated with an image.

When you click on an image stored on Pinterest, you’re brought immediately to the website where the image appeared to start with. This means that if you find, say, an ideal crème brûlée recipe with a picture attached, and you pin the picture, clicking on it later will whisk you straight to the recipe. (Just as if you were using a noticeboard on your wall, storing an image is called “pinning”.) And then it’s roll on with the eggs, the cream and the blowtorch.

Pinterest has enormous usefulness for knitting, crochet and crafts in general. You can store references to techniques, patterns, design ideas and so on, and then find them with a mouseclick. You can also browse through what your friends are pinning and get inspired that way. (If you’re curious, here’s what people have pinned from this very site.)

Organising your pins by category makes them easier to browse – here’s a bit of a board devoted to photography…

…but your categories could be anything at all that’s useful to you.

There’s a little bit of code that you can download to make pinning even easier. It’s called a “Pin It” bookmarklet, and it puts a little button on your browser toolbar. When you come across something you’d like to pin, just click on the button and it does the rest for you. You’ll find information about it under the “About” tab at the top of any Pinterest page.

And while we’re on the topic of useful buttons, Ravelry has one too. If you click on the Patterns tab and then scroll all the way down the page, you’ll find a link for getting a “Ravel It” bookmarklet. Then, when you see a lovely crocheted or knitted pattern online, just click on the button and as if by magic, you’ll be brought to the Ravelry page for the pattern (if it has one, but then, over two hundred thousand patterns do).

And we’re very happy to announce that we have a winner to our product review draw! Gillian, who’s Poppylillious on Ravelry, won with her review of Blue Sky Alpaca Silk. Congratulations, Gillian – we’ll be in touch about getting your goodie bag to you (it’s got a skein of each of our newest yarn ranges in it – Shetland 2ply, MillaMia Merino Soft, Petra Crochet Cotton and “Powerscourt“, our exclusive shade of Hedgehog Fibres Sock yarn).

Your reviews are useful to everyone that visits the site, and they help us more than you could imagine. You’re helping us build a resource for crocheters and knitters all over the world, so thank you all. We couldn’t do this without you.

PS: Did you see we were shortlisted in the “Best Blog of a Business” category of the Bord Gais Social Media Awards? We’re delighted!

That’s a piece of lace, straight off the needles. Looks pretty unimpressive, doesn’t it? It’s nothing like the beautiful delicate lace creations that you see on people’s Ravelry project pages, and it’s easy to think that something must have gone wrong. It hasn’t, and there’s one magic word that will reveal the loveliness.

Blocking.

Blocking is the yarn equivalent of styling your hair. Sometimes you just want to give it a quick brush and tie it back, sometimes you want to do a bit more. Lace needs that bit more: it takes a little time, it needs a little care, but the results are oh! so worth it. This post illustrates the entire process of blocking a triangular shawl for you, because we’ve been asked several times to cover the topic (and because it was an excuse to knit some lace specially!).

The materials you need are simple: a basin of cool water, a towel, some string, some rustproof pins, a measuring tape and something you can stick the pins into. That can be a carpet, a mattress, or blocking mats. (If you use your own bed first thing in the morning, your lace will be dry by bedtime. NB: do not use your bed if it’s a waterbed; trust us on this.) If you’ve got blocking wires, you won’t need the string, and the whole process will go faster, as we’ll see below. A spray bottle filled with plain water is useful if you’ve got warm conditions, so you can give your lace a nice misting to stop it drying too fast as you block it out.

Before you start, weave in your ends, but don’t clip them short just yet.

Next, thread some string through the long side of your shawl, using a piece at least one and a half times the length of the side. (You can expect lace to grow by 30%, so longer is better than shorter here.) Tie a loop in each end of the string so you can pin it to your blocking surface.

Give your lace a nice long soak in a cool bath. If you want, you can put some wool wash in there, and some people swear by a drop of hair conditioner (after all, most yarn’s hair too). Leave it for at least twenty minutes, because you want to make sure the fibre is all evenly saturated (an hour’s even better, and overnight won’t hurt).

You want your lace to be evenly damp but not dripping, so blot it in a towel so remove excess water after you rinse. Leaving the rolled-up towel for a couple of hours will ensure that you’ve got nice damp lace, but if you’re in a hurry, standing on the rolled-up towel will hasten the process.

Pin the string, well stretched out, to your blocking surface, and then pin down the point of the shawl.

Now you can start pinning out the sides. The measuring tape comes in useful here to make sure you’re getting an even size.

Keep on pinning until you have the points all pinned out and the long side straight – pinning out the string rather than the lace on the latter helps to keep your edge nice and even.

If you’re using blocking wires, then the procedure is even simpler – just thread one wire through the long edge of the shawl and another through each of the short sides:

Then pin out the wires. A few pins on each side will be enough, rather than a wee forest of them for the string-and-pin option:

When you’ve got your lace all blocked out, leave it to dry completely. Overnight will do nicely, or overday if you’re using your own bed. It goes without saying that you should exclude your beloved pets from the area (though this won’t always work, as this Ravelry thread demonstrates). Other humans, large and small, should be dissuaded as well.

Then unpin your lace and prepare to be amazed.

Magic!

We must have some of the fastest keyboardists on Earth, you know – no sooner was Woolly Wormhead’s Hat Design Workshop announced than it was booked out. It’s on Sunday August 12th, which is some time away, and a lot can happen in four months. So we’re talking a little about it here, and encouraging those of you who weren’t lucky enough to nab a place to put your names on the waiting list (this worked out very well for Kate Davies’ workshop – a few spaces came free and were made available to the entire waiting list on a “fastest finger first” basis!).

Woolly Wormhead is a terrific designer, specialising in hats: traditional, quirky, show-stopping (often all three together), and all cleverly designed and a delight to knit. But rather than tell you all about her in our words, we thought it would be better to read her own. So here’s our interview with her:

TIK: When did you start designing and why?

WW: I started self publishing my designs in 2005 through my old blog, as a way to not only record what I was doing, but also to see if there was any interest in what I was doing. At the time I was a full time Art/Textiles teacher and was struggling with health issues, and found that writing my designs in pattern form helped keep my brain active, as well as provide another creative outlet for me to explore. I’d always made and designed my own clothes, whether sewn or knitted, that’s something I’ve done since I was a child, but writing them down to share, and grading them for different sizes, made everything more real. The response to those first designs provided the encouragement I needed to continue.

TIK: Why do you design hats?

WW: There are many reasons why I like to design Hats!

They are portable, and as we travel a lot and live in a relatively small space, portable is a must. They are perfect for learning and practising new techniques, as they don’t need the same commitment that a larger project does, and they’re relatively quick to make and reknit. I have a short attention span and get bored very quickly knitting larger projects, so Hats make perfect instant satisfaction projects. Let’s not forget circles and spheres; a Hat builds on these shapes and allows for some pretty amazing patterns and structures. Hats are expressive and fun to wear – they can dress up or dress down a mood, the most versatile of accessories. Finally, to me, Hats are little wearable sculptures. My specialism is 3D Textiles, and Hats are as good as it gets when it comes to mixing fashion and sculpture.

I did say there were many reasons, right?

TIK: What’s the most important characteristic for a hat to have?

WW: Good fit is pretty important – one size doesn’t fit all – sure, knitting stretches, but stretch it too much and it distorts. In my mind, it also needs continuity between the brim and the body and the crown – that’s pretty important for a good design.

TIK: What’s your favourite knitting technique?

WW: Hmm… not sure I have a favourite technique! There are several I like to use, such as kitchener, provisional cast-on, short rows. I’m especially loving short rows at the moment! I think any technique that allows me to create a seamless 3-dimensional construction is going to be a winner with me. I don’t like seams or picking up stitches, and would much rather graft something or find another way around the construction that, while it may seem a little challenging at times, will overall produce a neater finish and provide continuity in the design.

TIK: What do you say to people who claim that hats don’t suit them?
WW: There’s a Hat out there for everyone, they just haven’t found the right Hat yet.

You can read more from Woolly Wormhead and browse her designs at her website at this link. We can’t wait till August, when we get to find the right hat, and design it, and make it!

(All images in this post are (c) Woolly Wormhead)

When you see something you’d like to attend, whether it’s one of our classes or a special event like the Yarn Tasting, you start the booking by clicking on the blue button (we’ve put an arrow pointing to it):

This brings you to the booking form, where you enter your details, and where you can also add any useful information, like whether you need wheelchair access or what sort of project you need help with:

When you’ve filled in your details and clicked on “Book Now”, you’ll be brought to a page telling you to check your email inbox – we’ll just have sent you an email with a link for confirming your booking:

Beware! At this point your booking isn’t complete – you’ll need to open that email, which will look rather like this:

Click on the link contained in that email, and you’ll be brought back to the final booking page. At this point, your booking has been made, and the only thing that remains is payment. You can use your PayPal account to make the payment or you can call us on (+353) (0)1-6709981 with your credit card details.

That page also includes your booking reference number and information on our cancellation policy.

If you’ve got any questions on the booking process, post in the Comments below to ask. One final word: we’re planning a number of exciting events in the coming months (shhhh!), so keep an eye here and on our Twitter feed for updates!

What a lovely day we had on Saturday! We were honoured to host Kate Davies’ Steek Sandwich class, and the mezzanine was transformed for the day into a workshop space, with plenty of space for the fifteen lucky attendees.

Steeking is a traditional Shetland technique, allowing complex stranded colourwork to be worked in the round even if the final article is flat, like a cardigan or a blanket. We got a chance to examine some really impressive work, including the beautiful cardigan dating back to the forties that she blogged in this post – it’s an amazing piece of knitting (Kate found it second hand on eBay!) and shows that steeking, well done, resists wear over generations.

But Kate’s come up with a new spin on the technique which gives a smoother, neater edge to the steek, and that’s what she was teaching on Saturday.

We had to do a certain amount of preparation before the class, working up a small piece of colourwork in the round using Studio Donegal 2 Ply Merino. This turned out to be an ideal yarn for the purpose – with lots of colours to choose and contrast and excellent rustic “stickiness”, it also works up fast.

The first thing to do was to stabilise the edges of the steek with a line of crochet – even people who didn’t usually crochet found this fast and easy:

For the next stage, there was a certain amount of nervousness, which turned out to be completely unwarranted:

When the steek was cut, nothing bad happened at all! The edges didn’t fray, the knitting didn’t dissolve. What happened instead was neatening and tidiness and a fair deal of smugness, which turned out to be completely warranted:

By the end of the class, there was a lovely expanse of confidently steeked and edged headbands, and fifteen knitters with a new technique in their toolkit. We can’t wait to see what they do with it, but we’re certain it’ll surpass our wildest imaginings.

The thing about knitters is that they tend to be a good as their word. When we announced that Kate would teaching a class here, a certain contingent proclaimed that they would be there, with bells on.

See? As good as their word.

You can read Kate’s account of her trip over on her blog – she had as good a time as we did, it seems! We miss her dreadfully, and we’re already thinking of how we can entice her back. So watch this space….