Category: The Club

By Tricia

Our speaker in November was Alison Ellen, a hand knitting specialist and designer, who presented a slide show of her ideas and techniques along with a very interesting talk and a display of her garments.

Click on images below for a larger picture with a caption.

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She uses wool from particular breeds, mainly Leicester blue face sheep, and has it dyed to her requirements (also experimenting with dyeing herself to get two-colour, tie-dyed or random dyeing effects.) She takes her inspiration from colours in her garden and the countryside, also from other things like classical mosaics and buildings, eg. lichen-covered brickwork. Alison prefers to work with minimal seams, such as guernsey-style sweaters knitted in the round, or using crochet, grafting and cast-off techniques to join seams. She showed how she uses modular knitting to produce square, diamond or shell shapes, knitting each shape on from the edges of the first shapes; short row techniques to make flares in garments and to create 3D sculptural objects; entrelac as we have never seen it before, with 2×2 rib instead of stocking stitch, making a stunning fabric; and increasing/decreasing within the rows, rather than at the edge of a piece of work to make flowing shapes and zigzag designs.

It was a pleasure to welcome several visitors particularly interested in hand knitting coming along with club members to enjoy the talk.

The following additional notes were contributed by April.

The Sussex Guild, to which Alison Ellen belongs,  has over 50 members, with a great variety of talent.   I thoroughly enjoyed her hour long talk, illustrated with more than a dozen garment samples and a splendid presentation. I loved her original use of colour blending and was delighted to hear her talk about her dyeing methods.   She has several different methods of dyeing her yarn which is uniquely spun for her.   These produce very different effects when knitted. The sheep’s wool is from Romney sheep and is superbly soft.  Many of her coloured techniques are specially designed for hand knitting but these could possibly be replicated on the machine by using  Fairisle.   She also showed us sculptured knitting which is produced by a variety of stitches and gave very interesting techniques. Her presentation was full of ideas, techniques and colour which I think will inspire me in the future.

Designer Evening

This is the start of the new programme,  so check the programme section of the website to see what is coming up in the months ahead, there are old favourites like the Party in December – what a great time we had last year – and new ideas – designer evenings where we choose a designer or well- known machine knitter and look at their ideas doing demos of aspects of their work.

This month we concentrated on the excellent videos created by Diana Sullivan in Austin Texas.  She has put online, using Youtube, the most comprehensive set of teaching videos which are also the most user-friendly.

Firstly the notices:  

• the Machine Knitting Live in Bournemouth on the Saturday 6th October,
  
• the main London Knitting and Stitching show at Alexander Palace. 
  11th – 14th October 2018  
• Next month we need to bring our cheque books to pay our half-yearly club subscriptions.
• Margaret is setting up a Charity Knitting group with the U3A, is will be hand knitting, initially. The first meeting is on 22nd October – contact her if you intend to go along.
  

The show and tell this month demonstrated that some people knitted through the extremely hot weather earlier in the summer.

 

After the brilliant show and tell, we had our usual tea and coffee break, with cake of course. 

The rest of the evening was taken up with demonstrations by committee members of various interesting ideas by Diana Sullivan.

This month was a lovely club evening.  To start, as we had made some scarves and other items for charity,  Gill, our chairwoman, suggested we talked about our items. The aim was to use up some yarn from our stash by stranding together or knitting in stripes or just plain colours to use up yarn left over from other projects.

Previously Margaret had demonstrated a non-roll edging which was useful for single bed stocking stitch scarves. There were a range of techniques used, ribbing, tuck. tuck lace, garter stitch as well as stocking stitch.  edges and fringes were added to some. In addition to the scarves,  a hat and some dolls were also made.  All these will be donated to the charity Knit for Peace.

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In addition, some items were given in for a Christmas stall which Gillian is running in support of the Hospital Kidney Unit.

We followed this with a show and tell where some members had brought along their recently made items and discussed them.  There were some lovely yellow bed socks from Barbara, a sweet little tank top for a panda toy from Tricia, an interesting knitted cactus from Gill, April had a pretty child’s blue dress with a cable motif plus a nice cone- ends child’s cardigan with bands of different colours and two lovely sleeveless dresses from Angie. What a talented bunch of knitters we have in our club. (Sorry no photos as they were packed away before I had time to take any.)

After this, we had a Hints and Tips discussion where members had brought along their favourite hints or tips and we all found out about something we hadn’t known before. A list will be available shortly on this website. The discussion that followed made for a very interesting evening.  

There were two demonstrations – April brought along her homemade blocking board and a steam iron to show us how she steamed the edge of a tuck stitch baby blanket, Margaret set up a machine to demonstrate a method of unravelling several rows easily using the Garter bar retaining piece to hold the needle still in Hold position.  Nobody had seen this before and we were very interested in how quickly and easily you could undo rows without dropping stitches.

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We had a wonderful talk from Jools Elphick who brought along a large range of her knitted hats.  She entertained us with a history of her work intertwined with anecdotes about her life.  Having started making garments she moved by degrees into hats and her designs are widely sought after by high-end retailers both in the US and the USA. She is now looking to explore some new areas of knitting.[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”18″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_imagebrowser” ajax_pagination=”0″ order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]

Some of the hats were modelled by one of our members and the came to life once on the head, the intricate structure that made them look so great was explained. And we had the opportunity to examine them in detail after the talk.

 
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We would like to thank Jools for making such an enjoyable evening and also Sarah who modelled the hats.

After the usual formalities of the AGM where the current committee was re-elected and Clare was co-opted onto the committee there was a show and tell where we showed off the small items we had made using various cone ends. 

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The evenings subject was making a scarf with non-roll edges, Margaret and Frances demonstrated the technique for those who had forgotten, and this was a starting point for us all to do 20 rows on this scarf.  It is hoped that everyone will make a scarf using their cone ends for the Knit for Peace charity. We will be collecting the scarves later in the year.

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There were two themes to the club meeting this month:

1. A continuation of last months meeting on cone ends.
2. A look at other crafts our members indulge in.

First, we had a round-up of the other craft work some of the members brought it, it varied from beading, hand knitting and crochet to bag making with painting and sketching, quilting and card making with variations on these as well. Members showed us which crafts in the display were theirs and talks briefly about them.

Many members hand knit which complements their machine knitting. Others have taken up a variety of other crafts.

(ed: the slide shows takes ages to load, please be patient.  Also click the image to move to the next one)

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After this, we returned to the cone ends topic and looked around at all the items brought in, most people had created items from their stash and also a range of patterns were available for using up the left-overs that inevitably occur when using coned yarn.  There were pretty gloves and scarves, as well as tiny items, stuffed animals and toys. Some were machine knitted, others hand knitted or crocheted.  

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Finally, Margaret repeated last month’s demonstration but this time with smooth yarn which showed clearly the difference between using yarn simply run together onto the machine, yarn wound using a standard winder and 2 methods of twisting – using a  hand or machine operated yarn twister and using a cone stack which is not as effective as the yarn twister and much more of a fiddle to use.  The cone stack can be mimicked by placing cones on an old-fashioned tiered saucepan stand, there are manual and electric yarn twisters available.

 

(ed: Apologies to those whose work does not appear – not all the photos were clear enough to display)

Ideas for using Cone Ends

Gill started the evening with notices – Kingston Hospital (Surrey) has asked us to knit some breasts to aid midwives who are demonstrating breastfeeding. Those who watch the Call the Midwife series on the BBC may have noticed them in their clinic using similar aids.  The pattern is for hand knit only,  email Gill or Lyn for a copy of the pattern.  Margaret, who has already made several ready to send off, said that they were quite tricky to knit unless you used small circular needles as the increasing and decreasing was hard on the hands. Please note these are not the same as the prosthetics created for breast cancer patients, there are a number of patterns for both hand and machine available elsewhere for those.

There was also a list of events:

• the Bournemouth Machine knitting show on Saturday 3rd March
• The Olympia Knit and Stitch show 1-3 March
• Unravel 16-18 February at Farnham Maltings

We continued the meeting with a show and tell.  Several members showed off their creations, see photos below and then we got into groups to look at the samples,  patterns and ideas everyone had for using up the cone ends at the end of this we came together to share ideas.

Show and tell

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Cone Ends Examples

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The other theme this evening was to use several yarns together to create a new yarn, often suitable for use on a chunky machine.  Various techniques were demonstrated:

• Running yarns directly through a multi-way yarn mast
• Winding several yarns together on a standard cone winder
• Use of a yarn stack where the bottom yarns are run up the centre of the ones above. 
• Using yarn twisted to create a brand new yarn from several thinner ones.

The club has its own electric yarn twister and one of the members brought a manual one and a yarn stack. 

Margaret demonstrated how these were different when knitted up – the first two showed “rivers of colour”, an uneven distribution of the yarn colours.  The twisted yarn was clearly better but the yarn stack although a little awkward to use with smaller cones, also distributed the colours well.

One member mentioned she had simulated a yarn stack using a tiered vegetable rack and magazines from the 1980’s showed people who used old style saucepan stands for the same purpose.

Finally, Frances demonstrated how to plate both plain and patterned using tuck stitch, she also showed us samples of ribber plating.  You can use either a thick and a thin yarn or two yarns of similar weight.  Together the yarns should add up to no more than the maximum your machine will handle – e.g. 4-ply / light double knitting.

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The next meeting will be about other crafts that the members are interested in and also the theme from this meeting will continue,  looking at some of the patterns people brought in as there was not enough time for everything.