If you follow me on social media you'll have seen a lace patterned shawl. It started in green and blue, got ripped back and ended up in just the blue. That was the best decision made for this pattern. Whilst I love colour sometimes it's just right to use one.
The yarn is from Coldharbour Mill which is in Uffculme, Devon is just up the road from where I live. It is one of the oldest mills in Devon having continuously woven fabric since 1797. The Mill also spins on site pure new wool on its heritage machinery with colours inspired by the beautiful Devon countryside. This shawl started out in two colours but it just didn’t look right so I started again in this beautiful blue called Sea Foam.
https://www.coldharbourmill.org.uk/
I was inspired by a Japanese lace knitting pattern book that I had sitting on my Amazon wish list for a while and which my mother in law kindly bought me for Christmas. The patterns are mesmerizing with charts that are like nothing in the Western world. I had a play around and came up with two main patterns which are repeated in the shawl with some yarn overs and yarn held in front slip stitches to create the rest of the texture. I know everyone says this but the photographs really do not do it justice. I only lightly blocked it and it just zings.
Up until now I had shied away from having photographs of me wearing my creations but I decided that I had to bite the bullet. So many other designers do and I think its good to get your face out there so that you as my lovely knitters and supporters can see that I am designing for someone in mind (me) and that these things really do fit or are fit for purpose.
Now, myself and my husband are pretty good photographers with all of the kit but none of the time to really put it into practice. I did a City & Guilds Course in Photography years ago, so many years ago that it was all about films, dark rooms and processing in trays whilst drip drying your print. Anyway time was inevitably moving on so yesterday I decided to actually get on and do it. I thought our all singing all dancing SLR camera had a remote control, I thought I could hide this in my hand and click away. Oh, no ... things are not that simple in the B&D household. The camera is so blooming techy that it appears your mobile phone becomes the remote control, so not that easy to hide in my hand. Plan B was therefore hatched so with my faithful tripod, a big blob of blu-tack and my mobile phone working on timer I found a wall in the house that looked pretty decent and that had good natural light from the window and off I went. I have to say I am pretty pleased with the end result. I got extremely trigger happy and went and photographed all of my designs in one go. So yes, you will be seeing me in that orange t-shirt in quite a few of the new patterns. It just goes to show that you don't need all the gismo's and gadgets to create pretty ok-ish photos.
So, here is the link to the pattern, it's over on my Ravelry Store: