14th September 2011
Club Evening: Ideas for Charity knitting. We hope members will share their ideas for items to knit, with the Marsden Hospital Charity sale in mind.
Category: Meetings
Brief write up of meetings
February 2011 Meeting
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.
January 2011 Meeting
The meeting in January was enlivened by a post Christmas buffet to make up for the cancelled Christmas party. Everyone brought food, the committee members worked hard to ensure a good spread enjoyed by all.
The main focus of the evening was the annual competition and there were three categories:
- Group 1 – scarf to a specified pattern or a headband, again to a give pattern or fingerless gloves to any pattern.
- Group 2 – a waistcoat to any pattern
- Group 3 – any item made to the knitters own pattern
All items had to have been knitted since January 2010.
As so few items were entered into group 2, it was decided to add the fingerless gloves into that category.
The winners were,
- for group 1 – Margaret with a lovely scarf in shade of grey.
- or group 2 – Anthea with some pretty fingerless gloves in pink
- For group 3 – April who made a very unusual tea cosy with knitted fruit and flowers.
November Meeting
An interesting event where one of the members demonstrated how to clean our machines, two brave souls dismantled their Knitmaster and Brother machines to show how easy it was to take off the ends and clean out all the fluff using a long brush. Oiling and checking the needles were also part of this demonstration.
October Meeting
She brought a range of interesting garments she had made and explained how some of them were made.
One of the interesting ideas that was discussed was the use of a knitted cord as a yarn to knit with – although it makes an interesting sample, the length of cord that would be needed to make a garment is enormous so this idea is restricted to small items. The picture shows the sample that Ann showed us.
August Meeting.
Pub Supper. Fifteen members met for a jolly supper at The Star, Chessington Road, Leatherhead. We were served delicious food by very helpful staff, and all had a good time.
July Meeting
We had a talk from Fiona Morris about eco-yarns, covering yarns made from bamboo, milk, linen, etc.
June meeting
The chairman gave a talk about edging and seaming techniques showing us a range of methods and some lovely examples.
The members discussed visiting the Guild of Machine Knitters AGM in Basingstoke late in the month.