Wonderwool Wales

Just back from Wonderwool Wales, where I had a blast!

The show was great, with plenty of room, seating and food, all much more pleasant than the K&S at Alexandra Palace.

There were animals:

I loved the Posh Yarn stand where I saw their whole range in glorious technicolour and feel, as well as meeting the lovely Dee and Tony. I couldn't resist the Sheepfold natural sheep bag kits, and came away with their latest design. I also liked the yarns from the Old Piggery and Twist Fibrecraft.

The homemade cakes were delicious; no photos, they disappeared too quickly!

And I went to Woolschool, with a freeform knitting and crochet workshop with Prudence Mapstone, who was very inspiring. I'll write another post about that.

The scenery was wonderful, the number of sheep unbelievable, and the weather fairly decent. Overall, a great weekend!

Missing Magknits patterns

Knitting progress isn't very blogworthy this week. Mostly just working on the star afghan which is growing slowly, but doesn't look much different in photos than it did before.

Difficult to say if the moth problem is getting better or worse. I am seeing more of them on the walls, but am hoping this is because they are being flushed out. Maybe not.

I have put in some work on the Charlotte's web shawl, and now have only one pattern repeat, the cast off and fringing to go!




There are still a few Magknits patterns where I wasn't able to get the charts or files. I'm hoping the following will turn up on the web soon:

• Misty bag
• Beau jumper
• Birthday cables jumper
• Nothin but a T top - available on the blue blog
• Made with love sweater (kid's)
• Timon kid's
• Tech guy socks - available on the blue blog
• Trellis & vine shawl
• Delphine jumper
• Milanese lace socks
• Lux jumper
• Summer shawlette
• Bakerloo socks
• Honorine jumper - will be posted on knotions
• Seaside mitts
• Invested vest
• Brigid shawl
• Lemonade cardigan
• Jenora cardigan
• Summer sky cardigan
• Byzantine strawberry bag
  
  
  

They're not on my 'must make' list, so I'm not too worried, but I wanted to keep a list to look out for them.

The M word!

Moths! A word to strike fear into the heart of every knitter, particularly one with a sizeable stash. We are suffering from a plague of moths in the house. I've bought up Robert Dyas' stock of mothballs and the house smells horrible, but anything to protect the wool! I found 3 moths munching through a ball of wool in a bag the other day - yuk!

The other big M story is of course the demise of Magknits. Like so many others, I have spent many hours this weekend finding the patterns I wanted and retrieving them from Wayback or Google archives. I found this really helpful post of links late in the day, but it may help you. I did manage to get most of what I wanted, and some of the designers have been fantastic in getting files up on Ravelry, or promising to do so soon. I really should have saved patterns as I saw them - I had a similar experience when the IK site deleted all its free features- but I didn't get around to it because each pattern needed to be formatted individually to be printable in the UK. Same issue with Knitty, although I once I get over all the formatting and retrieval I've done this weekend, I really should start to do the same thing with Knitty patterns.

Star blanket grows

Progress on my March goals has been mixed. I did a little more of the Vogue silk scarf, I did make the variegated cotton scarf, but stalled on Jolien. I didn't cast on the bamboo silk or possum.

On to April, and the Stash Knitdown group have set the ever-worthy (and needed) goal of working on UFOs / spring cleaning. I'm not going to specify which ones I'll work on, but will log progress as I go.

However, I'm afraid I cast on another new project this weekend; the possum cardigan. The possum is not like any yarn I've worked with before, but it is very soft. I'm a bit worried that the sizing is too big, but am hoping that the ribbing will make it wearable. I'm working on the peplum and it's already falling into soft folds.

The star blanket is getting bigger, although a round is now about 400 dc stitches, and I had to frog a whole round yesterday! Working on this is hypnotic, and this is definitely my project of choice at the moment.