S'been a while! Knitting takes a twist

...well it has, it's been ages since I wrote a blog post updating you all with my knitting life! It's been a bit mad at my end, to be fair. I sadly said goodbye to my role as a Rowan Workshop Tutor/Consultant back in February. It was a really tough decision, I have absolutely loved my time with them, working with such posh yarns and designs which, as a customer, I'd been oogling since I was about 9 years old. Very personal to me. So goodbye, Rowan Yarns! Til we meet again, at least.

I am now, instead, a proud member of the knitting team at Woman's Weekly magazine. Which is amazing. I'm being shouldered with all sorts of exciting responsibilities, and the team are super-duper nice, I mean, really nice. Feels like I've worked there forever. Very right. So if you haven't been scouring every knitting magazine in the country for my designs, here is my favourite of my recently published ones which you might like to see! I'm really proud of this bad boy;

This is my first ever crochet design which I've had published on actual print, on real proper paper, which was featured in the February 2014 Knitting and Crochet Special by Woman's Weekly (which came out on my birthday, oddly!). I say first, there were a couple of others of mine in the same mag, you can find the details on my ravelry page. But this was a special one. This was inspired by the below image which was a promotional shot for a yarn company. Without my good old Rowan Big Wool and a knitted blackberry stitch to fall back on (the brief was for crochet, specifically), it was a tricky vision to bring to life, but I'm pleased with how it came out.

So yeah, that's a teeny snippit of what I've been up to. What I've found very peculiar, is the freedom of not being attached to any one yarn company. It's been very alien to try and pick knitting projects for my personal enjoyment, where I can use any yarn I fancy. Such phases in my life have given rise to some major yarn binging. Such as the Colinette Jitterbug binge (2007 - 2009), The Rowan Yarns Binge (2007 - 2014), The Easyknits binge (2010? - 2013), The Wollmeise Binge (2011 - 2013), and the newest one is The Namolio binge, which just kicked off this year.

Please note, that all binges only qualify as 'binges' when 30 skeins or more are acquired... yeeeeah.

So yeah, there's a lot of creativity flowing, it's lovely to have some time for the sketchbook, and incorporate social networking into my working role, as like, a thing. But also to binge a bit and have some fun, and learn a load of new things. It's lovely.

...and if you haven't seen the Namolio stuff, now is the time. She's incredible.