Crofthoose Hat

We love visiting the Scottish Islands and have taken MANY photos of the small cottages dotted amongst the beautiful landscapes.  When I saw this year's free pattern promoting Shetland Wool Week I just had to knit it up!

Ella Gordon is the designer of this free pattern available from the Shetland Wool Week website.
She has suggested four different yarn colourways, but so many people are coming up with their own!  It's such an inspiring hashtag to browse #crofthoosehat  I chose to stick with mostly natural yarn colours, but added red roofs to some for a pop of colour, and to remind me of our holidays.

The intricately patterned crown above.   And below it is inside-out to show my yarn floats.

I kept two rows of the more traditional coloured cottages, as I really like the natural brown colours, and also because we once stayed in a thatched cottage for two weeks on the Island of Benbecula.

And I added in a row of red-roofed cottages, as we have taken many photos of these whilst journeying through the Hebridean Islands of Scotland.

Overall, I feel this hat is too snug and too small for my head unfortunately.  My guage is really quite off too.  The pattern calls for a guage of 26 stitches per 10cm square, and mine was 30x36 stitches.  I think I knit this too tightly.  I will be knitting this again, but on bigger needles.  I do love it and really want to be able to wear the wee crofthooses to remind me of so many happy times.

Edinburgh Yarn Festival 2016

I am so lucky to be living in the beautiful country of Scotland.  Fresh air, wild scenery, atmospheric weather and so much History.  I just love all of it!  And within a reasonable distance is the beautiful city of Edinburgh.  This month was the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, a full weekend schedule of classes as well as a high-quality market full of beautiful stalls from all around Britain and the world.

As I had enrolled in a class I was able to arrive at 9am to wander around all the beautiful stalls in the marketplace.  But thankfully, even if you weren't enrolled in a class, you could still come along and enjoy the stalls and the fabulous hand-knits worn by all the attending public from 10am til 6pm.

The Event

Here are a few photos that I took, hopefully it gives you a flavour of the event.

purlescence

wee county yarns

Lucy Hague - beautiful
Celtic Cable designs

Purl Alpaca

Stephen West

Emma Lamb

 

Kate Davies Designs booth

If you like the look of this festival, and would like to see more, here are a few links to other blogs about the event.  From some much better photographers too!

Kate Davies

Tin Can Knits

Karie Bookish

Kikithings

Julia Hedges (and a second post)

Hand Drawn Yarn

Baby Cocktails 

Oranges and Apples

Knitsonik

My Purchases

Here are the bits and pieces that I bought, along with links to the stall holders:

  

I love this Kate Davies pattern book, and especially fell in love with the hat on the cover.  The autumn colours and the curves are just perfect together.  So this was my first purchase, all the wool to make this hat.  The wool is Jamieson & Smith DK but I bought it from purlescence, as they had a gorgeous wall of wool on display.

I am planning to make another Baa-ble hat, but this time turn the sheep into Alpacas, and use undyed alpaca wool for it.  I already had some dark shades and was able to add these two lovely shades to my collection from John Arbon.

Next I met some very kind and friendly ladies in the Purl Alpaca booth, and bought this waistcoat knitting pattern called Balboa.  They had so many of the garments knitted up already so that you could try them on, which really helped in choosing a pattern.

I returned to purlescence to purchase colours for the new free pattern promoting Shetland Wool Week as designed by Ella Gordon.  It is gorgeous little croft hooses!  Can't wait to make this one.

Look at these sweet little mini balls of yarn from wee county yarns!  Think I will just have to make another hat!

A beautiful pattern from Black Bat that looks just like Lily of the Valley, my Mum's favourite flower, so I will make this as a gift for her.  You could choose any British Rare breed wool to make this in, so I chose North Ronaldsay, as it is my favourite sheep.  They live on a remote Orkney island and only eat seaweed!!!  We went there for our honeymoon and they've had a special place in my heart ever since.

I absolutely love Kate Davies Designs, and really wanted to buy the full kit for her new pattern called Miss Rachel, but I had to take myself outside and have a long hard think about it.  I finally decided that I wouldn't get it for myself at the moment, as really my skills aren't quite good enough to invest that amount of time and money into such a beautiful garment, only for it to come out anything less than perfect.  So instead I bought a small project bag, and I will use this with dreams of Miss Rachel for one day in the future.

Lastly, I bought some bits and bobs from other stalls including some needles, some wool wash, a beautiful ceramic button from Beyond Measure and some sweet sheep felted earrings from Aileen Clarke.

After my class I went back to the market stalls and chose some wool from Wollmeise so that I could make this pretty shawl called Jasminde that was given to us in class.

My Class

I took a class with Martina Behm from Strickmich to learn lace knitting skills.
We first started with chart reading and made a swatch, here is mine.

Then we started the Jasminde pattern and Martina helped a few of us with close up demonstrations as well as tips on how to undo our work when we make a mistake, because we know that we will!

Overall, I had an excellent day and would love to go again.  I was glad I went by myself so that I could look at the things that interested me the most.  I wasn't lonely either, as so many friendly ladies began conversations with me, both stall holders and fellow shoppers.  There were so many people from other countries visiting too!  Maybe you could plan a visit next year?!