Knit Nation

Last weekend saw the giant bus of fun that is Knit Nation roll back into London once again.  It was a three-day knitting spectacular with classes, a marketplace and a great night of bingo on the Saturday.  I really did have an excellent time.

Let's deal with the sensible stuff first: my class.  It was Knitting With Colour by Susanna Hansson which took place all day on Saturday.  It was £100 and I really had to think a lot before I booked, but I got so much out of it that I'm really pleased I treated myself (there was a lot of treating myself last weekend).

The topics covered in class were intarsia, fair isle knitting, and slip-stitch knitting.  Intarsia was first and it was my least favourite to be honest.  I'm sure one day I will make myself or my Dad an argyle sweater or something and be grateful for the notes and resources Susanna provided.  But I'm not going to hurry that day forward to be totally honest.  Here's my intarsia swatch.  The two yarns were slightly different thicknesses which is part of the reason why it doesn't look great, but the main reason was that I found it very difficult to lock the stitches together at just the right tension when changing colour.

Next was fair isle.  This was definitely my favourite part of the session and the skill I really wanted to learn.  I would love to be able to knit a hat or some fair isle detailing on a jumper because it's one of the iconic knitting styles.  Pre-Susanna, I was too petrified to even have a go.  As you can see from my swatch I started fairly badly, but by the end it was looking quite good.  I have to point out that by the end, I was also on the wine and playing bingo which is why the pattern slipped a bit... Oops.

You can see that at the bottom the floats between the blue and beige stitches are too tight.  Susanna had a great trick to get round this: turn the work inside out.  This means the floats are carried around the outside of the work and so when you turn it the right way out they're a little looser and don't pull the fabric.  Brilliant!

Finally we worked on slip stitch knitting which is quite similar to the brioche work I did on some mitts earlier this year, but it was also really interesting to work with colour.  Susanna pointed out that this is a great way to use variegated yarns in combination with a (semi-)solid or even another variegated skein.  This swatch I did the same slip stitch pattern, but I just changed which colour was the dominant one after the first repeat of the pattern (yes I did have to choose the bright pink skein... duh).  As you can see, with the first repeat, the variegated yarn is the dominant colour and then you just get these sudden flashes of pink.  The second time round, you have the pink as the dominant colour but these great multi-colour flecks from the slipped stitches with the other yarn.  Fabulous!

The class really gave me some ideas of things I'd like to do.  I really enjoyed the colour aspect of the slip-stitch knitting and I'd love to combine that with some of the stitches in my brioche book.  Plus I picked up a really lovely fair isle pattern from P-Hop (incidentally a great charity you should all check out) for a hat that I might think about having a go at when I've diminished the stash slightly...

That's the other thing that I treated myself to last week.  A lot of stash.  Oops.  Well I say stash... I know what I want to make with all of them.  I think.  And I've already started one project.  Let's take you through some photos of (some of) the things I bought.

I've seen this yarn before, but I finally got to have a feel and absolutely loved it, especially in this purple colour.  My Knit Picks City Tweed has already been put to good use to make a Saville Row Cardigan.  I'm sure there'll be more on that in another post.  I'm working the sleeves at the moment.

I also picked up my pattern, yarn and project bag for the gorgeous collaboration London In Stitches by The Bothered Owl, The Knitting Goddess and One Hand Knits.  The South Kensington Shawl design will be a suitable memorial of my trip to London this summer as I seem to have spent far too much time trooping from South Ken tube station up Exhibition Road to something-or-other!  I also picked up some of the Bothered Owl stitch markers with a cake theme.  Every girl needs a battenburg cake stitch marker, right?

I also picked up a couple of gorgeous skeins from Sweet Clement which I am going to use to make a lovely shrug I've had my eye on for a little while.  I just love this colour!

Some other things that I haven't photographed were a couple of books (which I really needed), some cute shell buttons and a skein of Manos del Uruguay which I have plans for.  Plus I sort of bounced on Julie Tilly Flop and bought some of her cards, a tea towel and a print for my wall....

Finally, the great thing about the weekend was meeting up with loads of fabulous knitters.  There are so many people I know only via stalking them on Twitter, Ravelry or their podcasts so it was really wonderful to put even more names to faces :)