And here it is!

Julia has sent me through a still from her short film for which I knitted all those red jumpers last year. The girl unravels the jumpers to sew up a kelp coat.

Happy Birthday Roxanne!

I've always wanted to be a Jo Sharp fan, and I've knitted a number of her patterns and used a number of her yarns, but always been just a little bit disappointed. Not anymore. I just love the new design aesthetic in Jo Sharp Knit Issue 7, although I knew none of them would really suit me. For Roxanne, however, they are perfect and while looking for yarn to knit a fabulous tunic from Louisa Harding's Queen of Hearts – another fabulous book full of patterns which don't suit me but do suit her – Roxanne saw the store garment in Wool Baa and just loved it. I was thrilled to have a go at putting it together.

It looks hard, but it's not. There is really only a day or so (or a week of evenings if you don't have the Australian Open Finals to watch on TV) in the knitting and the pieces are woven together with the icords and not stitched. The hard part was getting the colour scheme right. So I knitted the back ribbing four times in different colour combinations and tried many different colours together in Wool Baa to get the palette right. It needs to be subtle, I think, softly toned and dark colours would not show up the different textures as well. That being said, I really don't think you need to buy 10 different balls of yarn, especially as you only use a few meters of some. In the end I settled on six yarns and used most of nearly all of them. The effect is fabulous and Roxanne just loved it. Happy Birthday!

Preserves

Cathy and Peter dropped by with these last weekend! They are the pears we used as table decorations for our wedding at Libertine last year beautifully preserved, literally! Aren't they beautiful!