Birdsong

About six months ago I contacted artist and designer Gabrielle Reith-Thompson. I have long been admiring her work - from her colourful paintings/collages to her more recent illustrative pieces. Her Small Stories products are sold in small boutiques throughout Britain and online. I just adore her quirky eye, the attention to detail and, of course, the tiny stories that you glimpse in her work. I hoped Gabi would be interested in creating a logo for me. We would be a good fit, I thought:  the strong emphasis upon geometry found within organic shapes, the obvious Scandinavian influences, and our shared passion for handmade objects. Gabi was happy to help and, thanks to modern technology, we had some lovely exchanges about design heritage and personal influences.

And Gabi came up with this.

I had told Gabi about how I grew up listening to stories about the Norse pantheon. I may be not be a particularly religious person, but the stories continue to resonate with me. I was rather floored when I saw this image.

Gabi had drawn something which not only references my Scandinavian heritage*, but also evokes my approach to knitting designs and speaks of my love of freedom, nature and simplicity.

I absolutely love it.

(You can followed Gabi Reith-Thompson on Twitter or Facebook. She is on Folksy and has a fabulous Pinterest account too)

*)In Norse mythology ravens were generally regarded as messengers, though the god Odin had two ravens on his shoulders - Hugin and Mugin - which represented memory and thought.

Paused

My wrist is hurting. It happens occasionally as I have hypermobile joints. Hypermobility doesn't hamper me much in everyday life - I just struggle to open jars and my balance is a tad wonky. I do have recurrent problems with my hands and wrists: constant knitting and typing will cause RSI in most people, of course, but  I am particularly susceptible. So what is a girl to do when deadlines are looming and there must be knitting? She pauses.

I have taken two days off from knitting and tried to avoid using my hands too much (*fidgets*). Instead I have polished off a few books, begun reading another, and I've celebrated my mumble-mumble birthday.

My man and I went on a jaunty little trip to Edinburgh to see The National Museum of Scotland's special exhibition on Vikings. The exhibition was mainly made up of finds from a handful of Swedish high-status settlements - interesting to me since I am so familiar with every day Danish Viking finds, but also inexplicably never really explained by the exhibition itself. The lay-out was also odd as most displays could only be viewed by one or two people at a time (we waited between five and seven minutes between each display case).

But the spindle whorls were pretty.

For me, the Vikings feel so modern and seeing  needle-binding (again, not explained), dyeing, spinning and weaving tools just felt so .. natural. These methods are still in use, the tools are the same and we all like a bit of ornamentation on the tools we use the most.

Post-birthday the world seemed to pause and snow came tumbling down. I went out to take photos of a recently finished knitting object (and some other things but I cannot show you those). But I was stopped in my tracks.

A trickster snowman and his dog (bear?) had been built on the pathway. I loved them. Sinister, menacing, and melting.

I did manage to take some photos but taking photos of scarves are really difficult when your Official Photographer is at work and the snow had already begun to turn slushy.

Sarah Hatton's lovely Edith shawl/scarf knitted in Rowan Kidsilk Haze in the colourway "Fern".

I have long been wanting to knit it and since I have been working on some knitting maths lately (pro tip: never use a stitch pattern running over a prime number as your base unit), I wanted to try out Sarah's pattern because I knew her numbers would work beautifully. And I wanted the scarf too, of course! I went slightly off-pattern thanks to external distraction and the end result is soft, beautiful and a great deal more lacy than it should have been. It was a joy to knit. I love Kidsilk Haze so much.

Finally, a big thank you to my friend Paula who gave me a beautiful birthday present: two hand-stitched pendants made from silk with gorgeous, delicate flowers embroidered on top. I feel truly honoured to count some amazing crafters as friends and few are as talented as Paula.

Paused. Some time to think. Snow here and then gone. Kind gestures from people. I like my life like this.

Bookish Knits in Knit Now

There is a reason why I call myself Karie Bookish - I love books and I love reading. Family lore has it that whenever they couldn't find me I'd be hiding somewhere with a book. I also love knitting. When I was asked to design a number of bookish knits for Knit Now Magazine, I had to pinch myself. What a dream assignment.

The first pattern is the Eyre Shawl.

I reread Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 2011. The novel was extraordinary - far richer than I had grasped when my 14 year-old self had first read it. Jane was a study in self-respect, self-reliance, and intelligence:

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

But Jane wasn't the only reason why I wanted to design a shawl. The housekeeper at Thornfield Hall - the inimitable Mrs Fairfax - was constantly knitting throughout the novel and kept having small asides about how she really had to finish this row..

The recent film adaptation featured a number of knitted shawls - one spawned several garterstitch shawl patterns on Ravelry - but I wanted to take a different direction. I wanted to design a shawl that was both as delicate and strong as Jane herself - something which Mrs Fairfax would have enjoyed knitting.

My Eyre shawl has an all-over chevron pattern which gently fans into a leaf border. It is very easy to customise: like most of my shawl patterns, Eyre has a design feature which means you can repeat the central chevron stitch pattern as many times as you'd like before starting the border. I like shawls like that because it means you can customise the size of the shawl to suit your yardage.

The sample shown was knitted in Malabrigo Lace in "Applewood". It blocked out beautifully and is wonderfully soft.

I also designed a hat and fingerless gloves set for the magazine.

I set myself the challenge of designing an Art Deco-inspired accessories set which would be accessible for beginner knitters. That means everything is knitted flat. It is a bit of a controversial decision in these Everything Must Be Knitted On Circular Needles times, but I've spent so much time teaching beginning knitters that I understood how frustrating it can be to see a beautiful pattern and not be able to knit because you're not yet confident enough to use double-pointed needles or circs. So, everything is knitted flat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was my starting point - after all, Baz Luhrmann has an adaptation out later this year and the High Street is already filled with Art Deco inspired clothes. The 1920s silouette was boyish and simple, but the details were everything but. I wanted to capture the lavish and carefree world of Gatsby and I did so by choosing a cashmere-blend yarn and use a glitzy metallic yarn as contrast. Likewise, I decided against designing something practical - this Gatsby set will not keep you warm, but it will make you feel glamorous and feminine.

The set is knitted in Rowan Cashsoft 4ply and Anchor Artiste Metallic in "Thunder" and "Blue" respectively. The hat is photographed as a beanie but is meant to be a very nonchalant beret à la Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde.

Knit Now Magazine issue 18 will be in stores from Thursday. You can order it online too.

PS. Knit Now has a history of supporting some truly talented indie designers like Jacqui Harding, Anna Elliott, Ella Austin, Elly Doyle, Anni Howard, Woolly Wormhead and Rachel Coopey. Just one reason among many why they are awesome.

The Woolly Landscape

My current commute project is lovely Sarah Hatton's equally lovely Edith shawl from her  Vintage Inspired Knits book. I am knitting it in Rowan Kidsilk Haze in my favourite KSH shade - Fern - and the project takes two balls. I am actually thinking it is more likely to take just a smidgen over 1 ball for me but we'll see.

I had planned on knitting it according to pattern but I started knitting it during the Danish leg of Eurovision and .. I unintentionally modified it. Ahem. At least my other modification is intentional: I used kb&f instead of k1,p1 into one stitch when you increase for the border. It just flows a lot better for me.

If you have read the interview which Edinburgh Yarn Festival did with me, you may remember I spoke about a colourwork hat I was knitting. Well, it is done now. It is the first finished sample from the Doggerland collection.  The hat (and pattern) will début at EdinYarnFest with the knitters taking my class which I think is pretty exciting. It uses Faroese yarn from The Island Wool Company, but most DK yarns would be suitable.

I can show you a little tiny glimpse of it! Or, as I like to call this photo, Welcome to the Woolly Landscape. Look at those rolling hills..

There are more gorgeous photos to come. I have a few patterns in next month's Knit Now (which should be with subscribers by early next week) and I cannot wait to show you.

The Glamorous Life of A Quiet Knitter

When people tell me they'd love to work in the knitting industry, I don't think my last fortnight is what they had in mind. I have been crawling around on my knees finding stray balls of yarn underneath boxes, behind furniture, and in strange places. I have been covered in yarn fluff and dust (achoo). My hands have been rubbed raw from handling thousands and thousands of balls of yarn. And then I spent several days tracking down product codes for long-discontinued qualities, noting everything down and triple-checking it against inventory notes before going home for long showers that did not get rid of the yarn fluff stuck inside my ear. Life, she has not been glamorous.

Still, there are good things to report. Firstly, there are new shadecards in front of me together with glossy previews of all the new summer collections. Secondly, two new designs are currently blocking on my living room floor. Thirdly, I have a logo for Karie Bookish Knits (more on which in a future blog post). And fourthly, Edinburgh Yarn Festival have finally announced their workshop list!

I have also finished my third read of the year.

Susan Cain's Quiet has been a real hit with readers this past year. As a reader it is hard not to be enthralled when a book tells you that it's really, really cool that you prefer reading a book to a loud party. That may sound like a cynical take but much of this book reads like a hard sell to the quiet, bookish crowd (i.e. people who buy books). Introverts like me are amazing - we invent things! we empathise! we could have stopped the recession! When Cain forgets to stroke egos or offer self-help solutions, the book becomes far more interesting: her examination of the 20th century as the century of the 'extrovert' is good as is her take on 21st technology enabling social interaction without sensory overload. As a non-American, I didn't quite connect with some of Cain's examples and some of her generalisations about cultural personalities were iffy - but Quiet was a decent read. If you've ever hid out in a bathroom stall to avoid small-talking your way through an evening, this may be a book you'll want to read.

A few random links:

• Culinary tragedy struck Norway recently. A moment of silence for those 27 tonnes of brown goat's cheese that have been lost to humanity.
• SPENT - a game about poverty. Can you make it through the month?
• Ten literary board games. It's from Flavorwire but we cannot have everything.
• I am mildly obsessed with yarn from Danish historic mill, Hjeltholt. Look at that 1-ply! Or how about their Aran weight? Oh gosh.

Hope you are all keeping warm and are knitting away. Me? Well, tomorrow I am donning my oldest clothes and will return to crawling around on dusty floors..

there will be no miracles here

Narratologists are endlessly fascinated by 'plot' - one of the most famous books on the topic is even called Reading for the Plot. Whilst I did read Peter Brooks (who wrote the aforementioned tome) and Mikhail Bakhtin at university, I was never a great fan of narratology. I preferred poetry to prose and if I read fiction, I sought out works that somehow clashed with Brooks' ideas of 'narrative ends' and 'sequence and progression'. A couple of years ago Tom McCarthy's novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. McCarthy was rather good at sound-bites. He declared the novel ‘the Finnegans Wake for the 21st Century’ or even a nouveau roman. This was utter nonsense, of course. I enjoyed the novel a great deal but at its core it was a rather conventional Bildungsroman cleverly disguised as an experimental anti-novel.

I just finished reading Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child. It is difficult to call it conventional and as I was reading it, I could not help but think of McCarthy and Brooks.

Hawthorn and Child is a detective novel - that most conventional genre of fiction and one which narratologists love because the genre's raison d'être is precisely narrative logic and satisfying progression of plot. Yet Ridgway's novel is also not a detective novel. The recurring characters of Hawthorn and Child are police detectives and we follow them in their job, but we only catch glimpses of plot. A boy was shot. Who shot him? We are never told. The boy says a car shot him. There is a man, Mishazzo, with whom the police appears obsessed. What does he do? We do not know as we only glimpse him driving from one place to another.

And that is what you get with this book. You get stories of the detours, the gaps, the liminal spaces within conventional plot structures. Does that make it sound hard-going? It is not. You leap from one character to another - in a way, Hawthorn & Child can be understood as a short story collection too - and every section/story is exceedingly well-written with very distinct stylistic choices.

For me, the whole book came into its own with the segment "How To Have Fun With A Fat Man" which is so cleverly constructed and written that I read it several times just to savour what Ridgway did. Here he juxtaposes Hawthorn policing a riot with Hawthorn attending an orgy in a sauna. Bodies mingle, mix and become blurred - and so Ridgway's prose mingles, mixes and becomes blurred. Paragraphs become bilocated in the narrative. It is a dream-like, yet visceral read.

Hawthorn & Child is an extraordinary read. I cannot remember the last time I have been this excited about a book and I don't think my words do it justice. Word of mouth has been very strong - in fact I first read about it on John Self's book blog - and I think that is how the book will find its audience. I hope the audience will be a large one. It deserves to be read (and read and read).

(Hawthorn & Child is my second read of the year. My first read was Mary & Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes; a graphic novel partly about Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce.)