String Revolution

It’s 31 July – the end of my first full month of blogging here – so tonight I’m writing a little round-up of what it’s been like. I may institute this as a regular thing. We’ll see.
Baker’s Dozen
I’ve written twelve posts so far; this is number thirteen.
Starting with a personal ad seeking readers, I followed [...]

It’s Wednesday! Here is the second in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting. If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.
Sewing: joining together planes of woven string (fabric) by stitching through them with fine string (thread). [...]

The purple thing is breaking my heart. Or stabbing me in the back, as the title of this post suggests. Is it knitting karma, I wonder, after my smooth ride with Down in the Woods?
I took the above photo on Friday, preparatory to making a bubbly progress post to delight and entertain you. See it [...]

First of all, I want to say a big huge HELLO and WELCOME to all the new readers who’ve joined us since I got it together to start actually telling people about this blog. It’s genuinely exciting to get comments and e-mails from you in response to a post I’ve written. It’s what this is [...]

My paternal grandmother, Eilís Dillon, was a multi-talented woman. Author of over fifty books (mostly children’s novels, but also detective and historical fiction) and a keen amateur cellist, she maintained households and vibrant social networks on two continents, spoke several languages (studying Russian and Hungarian in her sixties), and generally gave the impression that there [...]

I’m on a serious design jag at the moment – finishing Down in the Woods and starting the purple thing in the past week. I’ve been knitting my own designs for (good lord) twenty years now, and I was asking myself this evening, have I learned anything useful? One or two things. Here – have [...]

I cast on the purple thing last night. It’s flying along now – I’ve done almost 10cm. But I wanted to show you it in its newly cast-on state, because I love that. Just a few rows done, the pattern barely discernible – it’s such a hopeful little ribbon of knitting.
(See what I posed it [...]

I want to give credit for this blog’s title to Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who wrote the utterly brilliant Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years – Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times.I’m not finished reading the book yet, but it continues to set off fireworks in my mind at the rate of about one every [...]

I rarely manage to complete a project in its proper season, and this is no exception: here’s the Oyster’s new winter jumper, which I’ve finished up in some of the hottest weather Ireland has seen in years.
It’s a cuddly collared raglan in Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Tweed. This is a fabulously soft yarn, despite its [...]

I bought this intense royal purple Louet Riverstone wool (colourway “Phantom”) from Di Gilpin at last year’s Knitting and Stitching Show, intending to make it into a scarf for my mother. After much deliberation I chose a pattern – Knitty’s Elbac, version 1 – and set to work.
Have you tried Elbac? It’s breathtakingly clever, and [...]