Monday catch up

Hello to you, I hope you had a lovely weekend!  It was wonderful to see the sunshine and it’s been warm – out and about on Saturday, we saw more than a few brave souls in shorts and whilst I don’t personally think it’s quite warm enough for that, I did throw caution to the winds and go out without my waterproof coat.  Ooh, talk about living dangerously!

The last two Saturdays have actually been lovely days.  Two Saturdays ago, I caught an early train into Manchester with some knitting friends and we all headed to the Manchester Central exhibition hall for the very first TexStyle show.  It’s an easy walk from the main Manchester stations (we got off at Deansgate and it’s pretty much around the corner) and when we got there around 10.00am when it opened, we found a very large but well-organised queue already outside.

It didn’t take long before we were inside and ready to look around.

Manchester Central is a big venue but the show itself wasn’t huge, and I think that for a first show that was probably a good thing.  There was plenty of space between the stands and you could easily walk around the whole show without missing anything.  I’m sure that when it runs again next year there will be more exhibitors, and a wider variety of stands too.  There were a lot of yarn-related stands – hand-dyed yarn, alpaca yarn, undyed yarn for dyeing, knitting designers selling patterns and kits.  There was spinning, roving for spinning and a workshop on getting started.  In fact, there was a good number of workshops that you could do whilst you were there on a wide range of crafts.  There were also fabric and embroidery stands – not as many of those but I am sure the balance will be redressed next year.

First years of shows are always a bit of an unknown quantity,both for the visitors and the organisers, but the team behind TexStyle already run Buxton, Stafford and Cumbria Wool Gatherings so they are not new to the show scene.  I thought it was great.  There was enough for me to see (more than enough for me to spend money on, but more of that later!), two days of talks by creative people and a big space for sitting with tables and chairs.  There were queues at the food stall but I took my own lunch so that didn’t bother me, and the queue didn’t seem to last too long.

One of the big draws to the venue was the TexStyle Talks stand and on the Saturday when I was there, the headline name was Stephen West.  I’ll be honest, although I know who he is, I didn’t know an awful lot about him before I went to listen to his talk.  He designs wild and wonderful patterns, mostly shawls, and they’re not really something that I would wear so they are only really at the edge of my radar.  However, I do know that he has a large and loyal following so I wanted to hear what he had to say.

Here he is being introduced by my friend Lindsay from Making Stitches podcast, who hosted the talk stage for the weekend.  As you can also see, there was a big audience!

What did I discover?  Well, first and foremost, I thought that Stephen West was an engaging speaker and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to him.  I liked the way that he included his fans in his talk, encouraging them to stand up to show off their shawls as he talked through the timeline of his designs.  I liked that he was very comfortable in his own skin and very confident about his style of designing and knitting – and I really liked that he encourages others to be too.  He’s a fearless knitter, often not having any idea of what his design is going to be but allowing it to unfold on his needles, and he wants anyone who knits his patterns to “knit them better”; that is, knit them so that they suit themselves.  Want to change the colours?  Do it.  Want to make adjustments to how the pattern fits you?  Do it.  He reminded me very much of Kaffe Fassett (who taught me to be a fearless knitter) in the way that he spoke about his creativity, and I am always impressed by someone who has enough confidence in their designs to encourage others to try something new and potentially out of their comfort zone, whilst providing enough of a guard rail so that they won’t fail.

By the end of the talk, I’ll freely admit that I was looking at both him and his designs with new eyes.  I liked his approach to colour; his patterns reflect his flamboyant nature and so does his colour palette.  It made me smile when he said that he’ll use anything up to 20 colours in his patterns, usually from his own stash (he said that his shop, Stephen and Penelope, in Amsterdam is just his stash that he shares), heaps all the colours into a pile and walks past them for a few days, adding or taking away (although usually adding) more colours until the pile looks just right.  Here is a man who either doesn’t have cats who like to arrange things left out to their own liking or they are very well-trained cats! 🙂

I don’t know that I am ever going to knit one of his patterns, but I’ll certainly look out for it with interest when the next one is released.

 

I didn’t take too many photos whilst I was at the show as I was too busy chatting!  There were a few exhibitors that I knew so I wanted to make sure that I got a chance to talk to them in quiet moments – some I hadn’t seen since my last visit to Yarndale in 2019 so it was definitely time for a catch up!  I also spent quite a bit of time with my friend Caroline from Yarn Unique who trusted me to hold the fort whilst she went for a quick break.

Caroline is a very talented dyer and it was amazing to be surrounded by so many of her gorgeous hand-dyed skeins.  You don’t always get the chance to look at the colours in such a large display and it’s a joy to be able to squish to your heart’s content too.  You can’t do that through a screen!  Obviously lots of other people thought so as well as her stand was always busy, particularly her mini-skein pick and mix – honestly it was like looking at boxes of brightly coloured sweeties!  Looking after a stand for even just a short time makes you realise how much work it is for the exhibitors to be at shows like this for a whole weekend.  Not only have they got to be on their feet and ready to engage with people for the whole weekend, they’ve also got to set the stand up and then take it down afterwards; it’s a big job and I appreciated every one of the exhibitors who were at the show who did that so that I could wander around and admire everything they had to sell.

Meeting up with my knitting friends again, our train journey home was full of show chat and showing each other what we had bought.  Everyone had spotted something on a stand that was coming home with them; some of the things I had seen, some of them I hadn’t.  There is so much to see at a yarn show and because we are all different, there will always be something to catch our eye that someone else might not notice.

Want to see what I bought?

I don’t buy yarn without a purpose for it these days (or as best I can), however I must confess that only the centre Yarn Unique Turquoise (the photo doesn’t really do it justice, in real life it looks like a peacock) and the micro-mini skeins are earmarked for projects at the moment.  The Yarn Unique skein on the left (Sugar Plum) is just my colours and there was only one of them so I wasn’t going to leave it behind, and the Noodle Soup Melted Crayons caught my eye and shouted at me so loudly that I couldn’t leave that one behind either.  The micro-mini skeins came from All Wool That Ends Wool and they are just big enough to knit a rainbow cuff or leg section onto a sock.  There’s definitely an ulterior motive with that purchase as someone that I knit for likes to wear black socks and I think these will be perfect for breaking up all that dark colour.

And I surprised myself with a splurge purchase on a waistcoat.  I don’t usually wear waistcoats but I will be doing now!  Fortunately, I am a big fan of the “pots” system in my bank account so I have clothes money saved up ready for situations just like this.

Oh my goodness, the moment I spotted this waistcoat hanging up on the Lil and the Pickle stand, I knew I wasn’t going to leave without it.  It’s bright, it’s fun and I feel brilliant when I’ve got it on – and all of our clothes should really feel like that, shouldn’t they?

So, all in all, it was an excellent day out and I would highly recommend looking out for the show dates for next year.

 

Back home, you know that all I wanted to do was cast on one of my new skeins but I have projects to finish first.  My husband’s purple socks are up to the toes and then that pair is done.

I thought I’d get them finished last night and I might have done had I not, knitting tired, miscounted my decreases so I’ll need to unpick it in the daylight and do it again.  I won’t learn not to knit when I’m tired!

My Aardvarkish shawl still isn’t finished – I ran out of yarn way too early so I’ve unpicked that too.  I started adjusting the short rows thinking that it was something to do with the ball meterage, but it turns out that I have massively over-counted in the beginning and the whole shawl has far too many repeats.  There’s a theme here with things turn out too big!  I need to decide what to do to fix this – I’ll keep you posted!

After spending time with Caroline, I was reminded that I have a half-finished pair of socks in another Yarn Unique colourway – this one is Twilight Rainbow.  It’s years old, I’ve already knitted and worn out one pair of socks in this and I thought I might try and get a second pair out of the skein.  I haven’t got quite enough as I used some of the leftovers for a sock blanket square (I may have finished this blanket when I’m about 104) so I’ve used contrasts for the foot of the first sock and I’ll match this one up – I’m keeping my fingers crossed I’ve got enough yarn!

Not a bad amount of knitting this week, but I’ll be glad to get these three projects finished.  I get a bit antsy when I feel like I have to finish stuff off before I can start something new!

 

I was very pleased with myself last week as I got a couple of bargain purchases when I went to Aldi:

I love it when the flowers are on offer!  They have a sell-by date way before the flowers themselves are past their best so if you can find the bargain bunches, you really have got yourself a bargain.

Nothing wrong with those!

The purple casserole dish – well, what can I say?  I am such a sucker for all things purple, but I have actually been looking for a new cast iron dish recently so I just considered this to be the one with my name on it.  Because I cook on an Aga, I have to be careful about the types of pan I use that go in the oven (most of the cooking is done in the oven, not on the stove top) so nothing wooden or plastic that can split or melt.  Cast iron is great, but the Aga-branded pots and pans are very expensive and not necessarily something that I use every day so it gets hard to justify the cost.  This purple pot was about a third of the price that I paid for my Aga casserole dish over 20 years ago so goodness knows what it would cost now!

I try to make one-pot meals whenever I can these days, mostly because I don’t like washing up but also because it’s all ready at the same time, and this will be a great addition to my pan cupboard!

 

Once last thing to tell you about before I leave you in peace 🙂  Like many people, we have a mortgage that we are busy paying off, and I found a new app that helps you do just that.  It’s called Sprive and it’s a cashback app, but the cashback goes straight to your mortgage lender so that you can make overpayments and reduce interest and the term of your mortgage.

It’s a very clever idea – it did particularly well when the company owner took the idea to Dragon’s Den – and it works through shopping cards.  You buy a shopping card through the app for the amount you want to spend at any of 1,000 stores, the app gives you cashback on the card and you buy whatever you’re buying with the shopping card – you’re still spending the money you would have done, but you’re getting the cashback before you buy it, not afterwards as you do with other sites, and the amount of cashback you get depends on your mortgage term and interest rate to help you pay it down faster.

This is a link to get started and get a free fiver towards your mortgage overpayment: https://linkprod.sprive.com/refer?code=7Z85503O

It’s an affiliate link so if you sign up I’ll get some money towards my mortgage too.  It’s such a good idea, I couldn’t not share!

 

And that’s me for today.  The sun is shining and it promises to be a lovely day – definitely something to be grateful for!  I hope you have a lovely day ahead of you too xx