Greens and blues...

Today, this bundle of loveliness arrived in the post...

Yes, that is a whole pile of Shilasdair Luxury DK in the most beautiful contrasting shades of green, and, yep, I know I'm a lucky girl to receive stuff like this in the mail on a regular basis! It's one of the most fun aspects of what I do. Unfortunately I can't give any details on what this heavenly stuff will become, but you'll hear about it here eventually, I promise! Or, get on my newsletter and you'll be the first to hear once the veil of secrecy has been lifted...

I recently got a beautiful new camera and I've been obsessively photographing everything within sight. I'm still getting to grips with all the settings, but it's so much fun! And it's arrived just in time for my new self-published pattern, Taliesin, which should be released in the first or second week of July.

This pattern is still in the test-knitting/editing phase, but if you'd like to find out as soon as it's released, you can either sign up for my newsletter or drop me a PM on Ravelry. I also have a new Ravelry group for my designs too - come and join if you'd like to discuss my patterns - or pretty much anything else!

Scribblebook Wednesday #2 - Pi!

Another Wednesday, another wanton baring of my messy, messy notebooks... In this particular installment, I am dredging up some equations involving Pi from the murky depths of memory, in order to calculate measurements for a circular shawl knitted from the outside in. Also, some Celtic knotwork doodles (showing a little of the underlying grids used in construction) and some completely unrelated writing in Greek (I'm trying to learn Greek at the moment... as much as I try to keep my notebooks solely design-focused, sometimes other bits and pieces creep in inevitably!)

Scribblebook Wednesday #1 - Nennir knotwork

Due to my apparent complete lack of ability to keep this blog updated regularly, I've decided to take some inspiration from the wonderful world of Havi Brooks, of The Fluent Self. She has a couple of weekly blog rituals, and I thought it might be fun to do something similar here. When I'm designing, I tend to work stuff out visually, pencil and paper and graphs, and as a result, I have lots and lots of design notebooks filled with drawings, charts, calculations, etc. I am by no means any kind of artist, I like to draw out my ideas, but they are definitely scribbles rather than sketches. I always find it fascinating to see other designers' notebooks, so henceforth, every Wednesday I shall show you a page or two of my own. It may not always be pretty but I hope it may at least be an entertaining little peek into my designing process. :)

This page shows me working out the Celtic knotwork panel for Nennir (which was published in Knitty Winter 2012 - probably the most exciting thing to happen to me in quite some time!). You can see that I played with a few different variations of the shape of the knot before deciding on one that I liked best. The pencil sketch in the top left corner shows how I've constructed the knotwork - this is a technique I learnt from the writings of George Bain and Aidan Meehan. This is how I usually work when designing Celtic cables - I play around until I've drawn a cable I like, then I look long and hard at it and figure how to translate it into knitted cables. Usually I pick a spot in the centre of the knot and work outwards symmetrically. Maybe one day I'll do a series of posts on my techniques of translating drawn Celtic knots to knitted Celtic knots, but it's a complex process, so I shall stop there for now!

If any other designers would like to share some pages from their notebooks, I'd love to see them! :)