Knitting – Natter – Ysolda & the Little Red Tour

There is so much to tell, so little time to tell it. Last week was a veritable knitting/crochet fest. On Tuesday, my former pupil and now fully (oh my goodness designing her own stuff) knitting buddy, Jay came to have a Knit and Natter. Oh how we love it, eat, chat, knit, chat, compare wares etc. Luckily for him, Big B was late home. He can impressively hold court on yarn subjects for oh….10-15 minutes. Not bad. But then he took a dignified escape and we carried on in our yarn filled bliss. Jay brought some lovely sea asparagus/samphire to eat. Yummy. Obviously it goes very well with fish, but my half of the bargain was Goats Cheese tarts. I have to say it goes well with that too. We had already planned that we would meet up again at the weekend to take a trip into town.

We had booked to see Ysolda, who is currently touring our country at Purl City Yarns. I shamefully had not visited this new little emporium and it was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. We met up in the city, the sun was beaming down and never did it feel more wonderful to live an urban life!

We met the lovely Ysolda, who I think is fast becoming a knitting celebrity and in fact there was a bit of a frisson in the air. She was very lovely and was happy to put up with my incessant questions. I had far more that I wanted to ask but it felt rude to keep going with the, ‘Can I just ask…’ Many of the group there were very keen to try her samples on and she was extremely generous with her time and advice.

I have given a quick review of her book before, but on further reading I do think that it really has the most impressive range of sizes. The level of detail it goes into about fitting and how you do it is excellent and I really like the personal design stories and sketches. Looking at the garment themselves, there were very few seams and the most amazing neat finishing. Although Ysolda is Scottish, I think her design style is very much American in terms of construction. I say this is a good thing. We tend to knit in sections in Britain, as if each part of a garment is cut from cloth and is pieced together. In my experience, American patterns have more fluidity, more technically challenging but make sense in terms of ‘not having so many seams and knitted more frequently in the round. I think we will develop to demand more patterns like this in Britain, because actually it makes more sense. Less of that annoying finishing once you have completed your much loved project.

Well, after that fun, we had a lovely little look round Purl City Yarns, a few sneaky purchases and then off for cold drinks and cake. It was a glorious afternoon. Loved it, Loved it, Loved it. As I walked through my  local park on the way home and breathed out a satisfied sigh, phoned my boys to check how they were. ‘We’ve just finished making our paper planes and are off now to start a war!’ Well there you go, horses for courses.