crafty me

This Spring has seen a veritable renaissance in creativity at Hedgie towers, especially in the textile arts.

Many years ago on the bus to college my dear friend Ingrid taught me to knit. Ingrid was a free-form jumper knitter – she never followed a pattern and just seemingly randomly used different colours. The results were always amazing; true works of art.

So recklessly I threw myself into knitting jumpers – not a traditional start for the novice knitter. Of course unlike Ingrid I always followed a pattern religiously. The repetitive knitting experience soothed the stress of studying for exams. My first jumper ended up miles too big – tension issues – and I didn’t like the cut of the neck of the second.

Then I moved to the UK to complete my education and was seduced by a Kaffe Fassett exhibition at the V&A. I launched into his Persian Poppy pattern vest.


The colour work I took in my stride but Kaffe’s basic sweater patterns follow the divide-for-neck at armhole level formula that I hated in my second sweater. Altering a pattern to raise the neck was a bit daunting, Ingrid was a continent away, and work on the sweater was abandoned at this point. Some twenty years ago.

However, a rare attempt at spring cleaning recently revealed the wool stash and on a whim I just starting knitting a scarf – quite the easiest thing to do.


This led to me looking at the poppy vest again. I plotted every stitch on a graph sheet, and hopefully now have an altered neckline that will work. So the poppy vest is going to be finally completed! Woop!

Meanwhile, my freeform stripey scarf led to me trying a stripey hat to match – less successful, but still quite fun. I want to do stripey gloves now to finish the ensemble.

All this knitting activity was egged on marvellously by web 2.0: YouTube helped with knitting primer lessons and a twitter friend referred me to the
Ravelry site – networking for knitters! It’s speeded my progress up amazingly.


But, that’s not all! My textile activities are expanding . . . but that’s another post . . . .