Wednesday’s meeting started with Brenda our chairman reminding us about upcoming events:
- The Craft show at Olympia next week
- Unravel – a festival of knitting, mainly hand knitter’s event at the Maltings in Farnham, Surrey is coming up soon and it is an excellent opportunity to view exciting work done by hand knitters as well as a chance to see new yarns and buy some to try on our machines. Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 February 2011.
- The Machine Knitting Live event in Bournemouth is happening on 5th March 2011. Dates and links for both of these can be found on our home page in the events list (on the left of the page).
- Another Machine Knitting Live event in Croydon on Saturday 16th July 2011. At the usual venue – Ruskin College.
Brenda also told us about Metropolitan’s classes and events, Beryl Jarvis’s class in Uppingham. Some members have been to these in previous years and enjoyed them.
For the 2012 Olympics, sewing and knitting clubs, the WI and other bodies are hoping to make pennants for the athletes to take away with them. These can be any design but must not include the Olympic rings or the 2012 logo as these are protected/copyrighted.
Full details can be had from Brenda or there is a link to an alternative source of information about them here.
Next month Erica Thomson her talk is entitled “Pressing Matters”. She has requested samples for pressing. She will also talk about the wire jewellery she makes on her machine.
We will be joined next time by some members from Yateley and Fleet so please remember those extra cakes!
Iris’s Bishops Talk
This meeting’s speaker was Iris Bishop who is always interesting and entertaining so we sat hanging on her every word as she showed us samples of her latest work.
Some of the techniques we described were how to make a bulky fabric on a standard gauge machine using several finer stands of yarn as well as the usual 4 ply. On T8 you can get a wonderful bulky fabric using this method.
To prevent the yarn tangling, she suggested putting the cones in bags on the floor to keep the threads from clinging together as they come off the cones.
Iris has been revisiting some of the fairisle patterns from the 1980’s and 90’s to give then a more contemporary look and feel, fading the patterns out to give a shading by using small abstract patterns and changing the background yarns or varying the density of the patterning.
She showed us various textures she has been experimenting like with using rouleau over a fairisle pattern to make textured Celtic knots pattens.
There were also patterns with needles out of work where moving stitches every few rows made an unforeseen pattern.
Using alternate needles to match it was possible to use 4 ply double or make very interesting patterns that could be placed depending on which needles are in use.
After the usual coffee and cakes, there was plenty of time to talk to Iris and look at her samples.
We would like to thank Iris for such an interesting talk.
