Author: Lyn Leventhall

This month was a club night, Frances and Margaret demonstrated various short row techniques:

• Margaret made some easy baby bootees
• Frances did neck and shoulder shaping 
• Gill showed us a beret
• Lyn brought along a chunky triangular shawl to show that short row tehniques could be useful for shaping large items.

After the break, we did some brainstorming for next year’s programme. 

There was a Show and Tell, Gillian had made a hat and octopuses for preemie babies. 

Sheila showed us a jumper in a silk tuck stitch with hand knit lace for the cuffs and edgings. Also a bamboo tape yarn jumper but she had run out of yarn.  And finally, she had looked at the various competition entries and made a lovely scarf in the same pattern.

Our new recruit Ingrid had made some Christmas Present headbands and a linen yarn jumper from her own pattern which had raglan sleeves which were made all in one with less sewing up.

This month was a club evening with no external speaker. It concentrated on looking at how different yarns knitted up.

The committee members had prepared swatches of different yarns and textures to see the variety of fabrics produced. Over the next hour, we studied the way cotton, boucle, mohair, chenille, silk and acrylic performed with stocking stitch, tuck, slip, fair isle, lace and plating. Everyone participated in discussing the variety of uses for each fabric produced. Margaret had experimented how to use her chenille to best effect and keeping it stable. Her swatches were poured over with great interest.
Many articles were then shown by members with their accompanying swatches demonstrating how the finished work had progressed from the original swatch.
After the break, Frances demonstrated the use of the garter bar to the attentive members.
15 jumpers were collected that had been made for charity, following a request from April earlier in the year.

We managed to forget the lottery so it has been postponed until the June 2017 meeting.  Remember to bring some cash.

The business of the AGM was  over quickly and the election of new officers followed.

Chairman April has resigned and a new chair was elected unopposed – Gill Rise will be our new Chair. Congratulations Gill.

We would like to thank April for all her hard work over the past few years.  We look forward to he continuing to give some demonstrations as part of our club nights.

It was then announced that several members will enter the Sherbourne Vase competiton for Guild of Machine Knitters.  Winners will be announced at the next Guild AGM in June at Westbury in Wiltshire.  Good luck to those involved.   This year the Sherbourne vase competition rules had been changed so that only 3 members instead of 5 are required to work on the project. This makes it possible for different groups of people to work on this competition in different years.

Several people were working on the project to knit jumpers for boys in Syria.  

After the AGM there were  demonstrations of some of the techniques discussed by Anne Baker in her talk last month.  

	Margaret and Frances showed us how to achieve some of these techniques.

Finally after coffee we had to vote for our annual competition winner.

	All the scarves were completely different and showed the scope of this topic – with different colours, types of yarn and techniques for threading the yarn.
	1st prize – Angie Joint 2nd prize – Sarah Joint 2nd prize – Angie
	Angie is our newest member and scooped both  first and third prizes.  Well done Angie

The speaker this month was Anne Baker whose knitwear designs will be familiar to many from the Machine Knitting Monthy Magazine as she is part of Karabee designs. Anne has been visiting several clubs in the South East since the Bournemouth show.  She and her colleague Eileen brought a large range of garments which she designed and each had its own story.

We had a wonderful evening listening to her stories and looking at the various garments she brought There was also a sales table with Anne’s patterns and some haberdashery – lovely and reasonably priced.  Most of us went home with something we purchase.

We would like to thank Anne and Eileen for giving us such a wonderful evening.

After Anne’s talk we had some notices and then a show and tell – Gillian had brought two lovely hand-knitted animals a snail and a hedgehog.

This month we welcomed Joyce Meader who gave us a talk on Knitting from 1800 to around 1918.

The talk was extremely lively and we would like to thank her for such an excellent presentation. Apparently, the first knitting patterns were first produced before 1800 although these can be quite difficult to follow today as both the sizing and pattern writing style was fairly arbitrary. One she showed us was written as a single long paragraph.

Joyce brought along a range of knitted items – some original and some she had made from the vintage patterns. Many had stitches that were no longer in regular use. And, the ladies of the 19th Century were often tiny as were the garments, in particular, a little shoulder warmer which looked as if it would only fit an 8-year-old now.

In addition to the garments, she regaled us with stories of making some of these items, particularly a beret where the tension and needle sizes were ambiguous and the hat turned out giant sized.
The knitting accessories she brought along were collected from a range of sources, some from eBay and others were donated. Many of us have some of these in our sewing boxes even now and sometimes do not know what they are. But manny are familiar – the needle gauges which come in a range of shapes and sizes and an egg shaped wooden item which came with a tiny hook designed to mend runs in wartime stockings (which were in short supply and rationed).