Hello! How are you doing this weekend? I hope the world is treating you and yours well ... come in, come in, get yourself a brew and let's catch up. Well, after the excitement of last week and my trip to the West Yorkshire Spinners mill and also a busy busy day on Saturday at Black Sheep Wools with my lovely friends Lucy and Emma (thank you so much if you came over to see us!), this week has seen a return to normality (or as normal as it gets in our house). Sadly, it appears that I have been afflicted with "startitis" and I've needed to knit All The Stripes. I won't show you how many pairs of non-stripy socks are sulking in the corner because they didn't make it into the photo.
An award day out? What is this?! Well read on, and I'll tell you ... Back in January, I was delighted to hear that I'd been voted one of Knit Now magazine's Online Innovators in their annual awards - a very special award for me as it's the second time I've won one of the Knit Now awards and as the first one was my very first award EVER, you'll understand why this one feels particularly special - and it's thanks to you that I won. I never forget that any of the awards I win are down to you voting for me, and I am grateful for your support - and also that I am able to write what you want to read!
Knit Now awards are different to others in that they give the winners a money-can't-buy prize of a visit to a yarn mill and to my absolute joy, they had teamed up with West Yorkshire Spinners for a day out at their mill. Yes, I have been to the mill more often than most people in the last few months but you'll also know that I love looking behind the scenes at everything and it's been a few years since the last mill tour - there was no way I was going to miss this day! (For the first award, the visit was to Sirdar and as you'd probably expect from me, there was a full review of the first award day in not one but two blog posts 😀) Warning - this is a really long post full of facts, photos and more sheep than I think I've ever posted about before. You might need a brew. Or a sleeping bag!
Are you ready for the next instalment of the Winwick Mum Collection yarn adventure? Yes? It's been a-g-e-s since I showed you the yarn and now I can finally show you what it looks like knitted up! Do be warned - there are a LOT of photos in this post! You may have seen a few preview pictures of the socks from the Stitches trade show where - I am delighted to tell you - lots of WYS stockists very much liked the look of the yarn and are keen to have it in their shops, and I'll be able to show you the gorgeous pictures from the photo shoot very soon, but for now you get to see ... drum roll please ... new and exclusive photos taken in the exotic location of Winwick and modelled by big daughter and small daughter (both of whom now have bigger feet than me - how does that happen?!). Yes! Vogue has nothing on us! But first, let's roll back just a little bit to my last posts on choosing the colours and what goes on at the West Yorkshire Spinners mill ... It all started off with a conversation about colours. I'd chosen the four sets of colours for particular reasons, as I talked about in my colour inspiration post. By the time I left the mill that day, we had all the individual shades for each yarn picked out and it was all over to Sarah in the dye house to work her magic. I drove home in a state of high excitement and not a little impatience to see what she was going to produce!
What a strange title for a blog post, you might be thinking. Doesn't every week contain days? Yes it does, but this week has been a week of days that stand out from your everyday Monday to Friday. Tuesday was Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar when the original idea of the day was to use up all of those ingredients in the store cupboards that would traditionally be given up for Lent. Given that the main ingredients of pancakes are butter, eggs and milk, this doesn't suggest that Lent is going to be a time of culinary splendour and nowadays we tend to give up other things such as chocolate or alcohol, or perhaps to start doing something positive instead which is what I prefer to do. However, we don't like to miss the tradition of Pancake Day which, in our house, is always an experience in eating as many pancakes as humanly possible until you feel that you're going to burst. Our electric whisk whizzed it's last some time last year but luckily we've got the hand whisk from my Dad's house to see us through. I originally brought it home through nostalgia but now I'm very glad we've got it in the drawer!
