Wired

I spent some time in Providence, Rhode Island last year and I met many keen knitters there (not to mention visiting all of the knitting and craft shops in the city itself - heaven). One of them mentioned that she had enrolled on an evening course to learn how to 'knit with wire' and I honestly thought I had misheard. Wire? Knitting? With wire? As if.


Back in England, curiosity peaked and in a post-travelling funk, I started Googling "wire knitting". It was then that I found a vast array of photographs of beautiful, intricate jewellery created with knitting needles. Amazing! I kept on searching and reading and made a page of notes with people's hints and advice for achieving success in what looked like a particularly tricky craft area. The one consistent factor was that it should be attempted with 28 gauge wire, which I found in abundance on eBay. Since then, I have discovered that Hobbycraft also sell it on reels, in a variety of colours, for under £2.

My experiments with wire knitting have been varied in their successes. For a start, it's really difficult and makes your hands hurt. I had to dust off my knitter's wrist support gloves to prevent getting a RSI! Yarn bends and moves, making knitting a pleasure. Wire is much less forgiving. I had to loosen my stitches and use an embroidery needle at intervals to pull the stitches into order. Most of my jewellery so far has been knitted on UK size 10 needles, which are pretty small. This is to make neat, small jewellery but again ramps up the difficulty. Lots of patience is required if you are going to attempt this!

To start off, I used the exceptionally simple backwards loop casting on method shown here. This gives you a supple edge without too much messy wire sticking out. You must remember to cast on the loops from the reel of wire and not the tail from the slip-knot - I kept forgetting and having to slip it onto a new needle at the end. If you are going to attempt to use beads in your work, these need to be slipped onto the reel of wire before you cast on. Again, a learning curve that I did not get straight away. I then just used garter stitch to knit as usual until my wire was the right size.

For the wrist cuff, I cast on 20 stitches and knitted roughly 10 rows. I then used the break and thread method of casting off followed by wrapping the tail of wire tightly around one of the other stitches. Some of my cuffs are fastened with hooks, some with ribbon.

I still have a lot to learn about this method of jewellery making, but I'm pleased with my progress so far :)

P is for pterodactyl...

Recently something horrible happened. My lovely nan, the woman who effectively enabled and inspired this blog, died at home. I miss her terribly and only wish she could be here in October to see her newest great-grandson. In true form, the last thing she did before going to sleep that night was write 'blue wool' on her shopping list so that she could knit Baby Hart something. That is perhaps the most touching thing I will remember and simultaneously made the whole ordeal both better and worse.

What my nan did do was leave me all of her knitting needles and patterns in her will. I'll be honest and say I was excited to get my hands on them - mostly because of a set of books that I spent most of my youth studying and working through.

Nan was a big fan of Jean Greenhowe the woman behind the scarecrow family that used to be on one of the stops of the Playdays bus (remember that?!). As a child, I loved her creations and nan knitted the majority of them for me. Every week in the school holidays we would bike to Roys of Wroxham to see if she had a new book out and shriek with joy when she did. I now find myself in possession of upward of 20 of these pattern books and, I suppose as a way of coping with my grief, I wanted to knit something right away.

The choice was easy in the end. The first thing I ever knitted from a pattern from start to finish was a little yellow dinosaur with orange spots and his caveman friend. These patterns were in her 'Toy Collection' (1989, Jean Greenhowe Publications) book and you can see pictures of them here. It made sense to go back and create some more cute dinosaurs, so I did! I knitted two 'flying reptiles' and two 'cave people' (pg13-14). Greenhowe's patterns are devilishly easy to follow and these are no exception. The cavemen are knitted all in one go and then stitched up at the end, so are dead quick to make. All four took me less than two evenings to create from start to finish. But what to do with them?

It was around this time that I spotted some wallpaper on a bourgeois home improvement tv show (again, it was on in the background when I was knitting. Promise.) and developed a slight obsession. After many an hour of Internet searches I found it here; 'Jolly Jurassic' fun dinosaur paper! Absolutely perfect for Baby Hart's room. So, with a wall of dinosaurs already, I figured the perfect thing to do was turn my knitted creatures into a cot mobile. And so I did. I'm not sure if the cavemen will ever catch their prey, but they're having a good try!

Baby Chucks

Apologies, readers, for not posting for a while. It is not through a lack of creative endeavour, more a lack of free time to sit and type. Anyway, with the long summer holidays stretching ahead of me, I have time to get my blog up to date with all of the knitting that has been going on here at KnitsandGiggles Towers.

I am currently 27 weeks pregnant and becoming slightly unwieldy. I thought, by now, that I would have a drawer full of knitted joys for Baby Hart but instead I find myself running out of time. Bugger. Time to knuckle down and get those needles clacking!

My most recent project has been a bit of a fun one. As with most people my age, I own at least one pair of Converse trainers. (I actually own many more than that, but I'm not about to admit how many!) It has got to the stage where my husband and I often go out wearing the same shoes without realising. This was then amplified when we went to London to visit a friend and he too was wearing the same colour and style of Chucks as us. A uniform of our youth? Who can say, but we have since diversified our colour choices! Anyway, it didn't seem right that the new addition to our family wouldn't have the same stylish footwear as his mum, dad and Godfather, so I went in search of a pattern...

For a while, I considered adapting a baby bootie pattern but, as is often the case with knitting, a quick search on the Internet saves you reinventing the wheel. And so I found this pattern, which is perfect. The booties are knitted all in one go, starting with the sole. You then have to shape the front of the shoe, knit the side, the separate tongue and then the final side. My first read through left me confused about this but as soon as I got knitting it was clear and easy to follow. They literally take shape right before your eyes. The laces are made from an i-cord, which I have detailed before. I didn't make any changes to the pattern; it worked a treat. The last thing I need to do is add the felt on the side with the star logo.

The result is a great pair of booties that are pretty unique and individual. I'm now busy knitting them on different size needles with a variety of colours to see him through as much growing as possible!