Welcome to the Blog!
I hope you enjoy my musings on yarn, design, life in general - and cats of course!!
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As I have a couple of friends and a cousin who've had premature babies, I was delighted to be one of a number of knit bloggers to be asked to take part in Sunrise’s Senior Living’s annual #KnitforWinter campaign. This year Sunrise are supporting First Touch, a premature baby charity who work with St George's Hospital, London, and they’re asking people to knit and donate ventilator bonnets and blankets to help keep tiny babies warm this winter. You can find details of the campaign here: http://www.sunrise-care.co.uk/…/knit-for-winter-first-touch… - along with downloadable patterns and where to send finished items - and more info on First Touch here: http://www.first-touch.org.uk/
I'll be knitting some bonnets very shortly and will post more details in due course. The autumn show season is already in full swing. This month we've already been to Chelsea and Bristol, and this weekend we visit Skipton for Yarndale. Looking forward to meeting all our lovely customers from Yorkshire and the surrounding counties again, after a very successful show last year.
Early October sees us heading off for our biggest ever event, the Knitting & Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace in London. I've visited Ally Pally as a punter before, so going as an exhibitor will be quite special - although I think after five days on our feet we may need a day or two off to recover!! Talking of Ally Pally, I have four complimentary tickets for the show which I'm offering to customers and readers. Please note: although the show is open for 5 days, these tickets are only valid as follows: Wednesday 7 October from 10.00 am to 5.30 pm, or Thursday 8 October (evening only) from 3.00 pm to 7.00 pm, or Sunday 11 October from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm If anyone is interested, please message me by midnight GMT on Sunday 27 September, letting me know if you’d like one or two tickets - and I’ll draw the winners out of a hat. Tickets will then be posted early next week. If you’d like to prebook tickets anyway, to get a £2 discount off the full ticket price, book now at www.theknittingandstitchingshow.com and quote code EX15. Hope to see lots of you there - do come along and introduce yourself :)  The "wall of shawls" display at the British Wool Show, York. I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here - I must apologise for the lack of updates but it's been a very busy summer so far and the yarn steamers have been getting lots of use!
Since my last post we've had great shows at Proper Woolly in Devon, Fibre-East in Befordshire and, last weekend, the British Wool Show at York. We've met lots of lovely customers and sold oodles of gorgeous yarn, some of which has already started to appear in projects on Ravelry. We've added our new Mulberry Silk lace and 4-ply yarns to our show stock and some of these should be appearing in the webstore next week, after our return from the Popup Wool Show in Chester, assuming they don't all get snapped up - they proved very popular at York last weekend! The third quarterly yarn club of the year, Mountains and Moorlands, is now up and running and the first skein has been despatched to subscribers. I really loved the first colour and will be dyeing some more for myself, and adding it to our general stock shortly. I'm also busy designing a new mystery knitalong which should hopefully be ready for launch on Ravelry by the end of September. Not a shawl this time but a little top, ideal for autumn layering. Watch this space for more details.  I've finally managed to complete the updated pattern for Abbey's Shawl, so this is now available with updated charts and full written instructions. All our patterns now have full written instructions as well as charts, as will all future designs.
Sadly the Botany Wool Lace (merino) yarn I used for the fine lace sample of the shawl has been discontinued, so I've just put the last few skeins on the website with an option to buy the yarn and pattern together and save £1.50. You only need one 45-50g skein to work the shawl as written and there are several pretty colours to choose from - you can see them here. You can of course knit the shawl in any of our other fine lace or standard laceweights too. I have lots of others which will gradually be added to the webstore over the next few weeks. I'm also working on instructions for some new fingerless mitts and our first cowl pattern, which should be available this week. When we get back from Proper Woolly at the end of the month, I'll be working on our next Mystery Knitalong. This is going to be a garment, rather than a shawl, so watch out for news of that very soon. The second instalment of our current Yarn Club - Jewelled Garden - is now dyed and drying, and will hopefully be ready to post on Monday. Details of the next quarterly club will be released at the beginning of June. If the weather is fine tomorrow we'll be out in the garden, hacking our way through the jungle that seems to have sprung up (I bet Alan's been doing his rain dance again!!) and planting out my veggie seedlings. I hope we may also have some dahlias beginning to break through, so I have something to paint a little later in the year. We had a super time at Wonderwool Wales last weekend. We were blessed with the most beautiful dry and sunny weather, which certainly helped to bring out the crowds, and business was brisk for the whole two days. A big thank you to the organisers for a well-run show, and to everyone who visited us, chatted and bought our yarnie goodies. We hope to see you all again next year!  Here's Alan in front of our stand. The halls in the showground are lovely and bright, so you can really see colours well - ideal when shopping for yarn! Now we're back in Norfolk, I'm having a little sort-out in the stockroom. I'll be changing to a different supplier for my pure silk yarns, as the skeins I've had recently have been very irregular in weight, so I'll be putting all my existing stocks of mulberry and tussah 4-ply and laceweights in the webstore over the next few days with £3 off each skein. Grab them while you can!
I've also got a couple of new yarns to trial next month, so look out for details of those in due course. Our next event is Proper Woolly in Devon at the end of May - details are on the Yarn Events page. This is a new show for this year, so looking forward to taking the travelling shop to the South West for the first time. Hope to see you there!  Our stand at the incredible Edinburgh Yarn Festival. We can't wait to go back next year! March proved to be the most astonishingly successful month for us. With three shows around the UK, we met literally thousands of people and had fantastic sales, ensuring we ended our third year of trading on a high point. A huge thank you to everyone who travelled to see us at Olympia, Edinburgh and Coventry, and for the lovely compliments and feedback on our products.
We're now back home, tired but full of enthusiasm, and planning for the next year - we already have lots of shows booked for the rest of 2015 and are thinking about new yarns, colours and designs for launch over the coming months. To start with, we'll be having a major update in the webstore and adding lots of yarns that we've rarely had available outside the shows, as they get snapped up so quickly! This is particularly true for the baby camel/silk blends, and our new sparkle lace range. The merino/silk sparkle has virtually flown off the shelves, and we've just added a new alpaca/silk/cashmere version so expect that to be just as popular. We've also decided to rest our standard laceweight and 4-ply merino yarns for the time being, so that we can concentrate on British wools. Our remaining stocks are being reduced by £1 per skein to clear.  Great excitement at W&L HQ today - a skein of our yarn is shown in the Craft Crush section of the April issue of Crafts Beautiful magazine, out now!! This was Alpaca/Silk/Cashmere Lace in the Pale Lavender Sky colourway.
We're hoping we might feature elsewhere soon, as a photographer from one of the knitting mags took several shots on our stand at Olympia which might be included in a review of the show - watch this space! A number of bloggers also took pics so we'll be looking out for some mentions over the next few days :)
Getting excited now as we prepare for our first appearance at the Olympia show from 5-8 March. There will be some new limited edition yarns on our stand and as always new colours of our usual stock.
We've been allocated four complementary tickets for the show, valid on the Thursday, Friday or Sunday (NOT the Saturday). If you'd like a chance to win one or two, please send us a message - telling us whether you'd like one or two tickets - via the contact form by Wednesday 25th February. I'll draw the winners from the names received on the following day and get in touch straight away. If anyone would like to book tickets anyway before the show, we’ve been given an offer code which will save you £2 per ticket, giving a price of £11 instead of the normal £13. Go to www.theknittingandstitchingshow.com/spring and quote EX15 when booking.  We had a great time at Waltham Abbey Wool Show last Sunday - lots of people came to the second running of this event and it was lovely to catch up with old customers and meet lots of new ones. Our project bags and needle rolls proved very popular this time, so we're busy making new stocks of those.
We now have a break (but not a rest - the dyepots will be working overtime again!) before the next round of shows in March, kicking off at the start of the month with the Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia. The following weekend we'll be at the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, and then p-LUSH in Coventry at the end of the month. All three events are new to us so we're looking forward to meeting lots of potential new customers. Do pop along and say hello if you're attending any of them. While we're between shows I'm trying to get more stock onto the website here, so look out for some new yarns and colours. I've got a few limited edition yarns to try out, so they will be appearing here very soon - watch this space! |
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Sooty and Shadow sharing the new cat bed!
Shadow in his favourite winter spot - warming on the radiator!
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