New knitting yarn...socks ...and samples....!

A couple of weekends ago I went to the 'Shoreham Knitting and Needlecraft Shop' to get some new knitting yarn for my mum. She loves to knit and has been wanting to knit something new for me for a while now, (which is lucky for me!)

'The Shoreham Knitting and Needlecraft Shop' is an amazing! It's jam-packed full of knitting yarns, floor to ceiling and it's really colourful... it's like an old-fashioned sweet shop!

If you want to check it out for yourself here's the shop's website address: www.englishyarns.co.uk

Anyway, this is what I bought.......
(I already had the Kim Hargreaves 'Indigo' knitting pattern book - top left pic), so I just had to buy the yarn. I bought some lovely Rowan 'Creative Linen' yarn, in a fantastic cherry red colour.

My purchases!

My mum is going to knit this pattern for me, (top right and bottom left pics).... it's quite a simple 'T-shirt' style pattern - it'll give my mum a break from the complicated knits I often ask her to do for me!

The 'Indigo' book came out last year, but the patterns don't really date and Kim Hargreaves is one of my favourite knitwear designers :-)

After buying something for my mum to do I wanted to have something to knit myself too:-) So I'm doing these stripey socks. I've knitted gloves and mittens before, but not socks... but how hard can it be?!

Work in progress....

The yarn is such a great combination of earthy and jewel-like colours and its a bit of a cheats way of knitting stipes! It keeps you wanting to knit it too, as the colours change every few rows or so. The yarn is from a range by Regia/ Kaffe Fassett and it's a 4 ply yarn. As you can see, I'm knitting in the round - an interesting and slightly strange process!

I've also bought a few other new knitting patterns recently - a new Kim Hargreaves summer book, 'Spirit', and 2 new Martin Storey  pattern books - all for Rowan summer cotton yarns.

All this knitting inspired me to dig out some old knitting samples I made years ago but never did anything with. I designed and knitted them myself and even after all this time I still like them!

My knitting samples

It's funny how if you wait long enough fashions come back around again, and these kinds of designs are back in fashion again now, especially the 'kilim' style design. But maybe things don't ever go out of fashion... they just get recycled(?)! I came across these beautiful charts below on the internet the other day. They come from an old DMC embroidery pattern book and feature the same kind of geometric, kilim style designs that I used in my knitting samples above. Not sure how old these embroidery patterns are..

 

Pictures of the DMC charts are taken from this website: http://albumsdantan.canalblog.com

Here's a couple of recent fashion shots of garments that I like that have a similar feel :-)

Picture above from:  www.hautelook.com
Picture below from: http://pinterest.com