May 10, 2008
This is The News
It's a bit disappointing, but I've withdrawn from the agreement to produce a book of my work. The intentions were good, but the timing was bad. I have enough keeping me awake at night without worrying about my lack of progress towards deadlines. It would have been glorious to see a beautiful, glossy hardback with my name on it. A book would likely have opened many doors - and I admit that part of me feels like a dismal failure.
Another part, however, knows surely that as one door closes another opens, and this is the right decision. As soon as it was made, I felt a huge weight had lifted from my shoulders. And of course, I still have all the work I had done so far (including patterns for Daisy, Tiggy, a lace stole designed for a bride, a beaded clutch, delicate cotton gloves, a dense cabled cardigan coat and more), which I can publish myself and submit to magazines.
I hope, too, to get back to writing here; sharing the process, and having space to knit other people's patterns, both for me and for my precious boy. I've missed it. Spread too thin - the joy of knitting was in danger of leaving. I have a little work to do to extricate myself from a mild funk, but I hope you'll be here with me.
With love,
anna
x
Posted by Anna at 08:55 AM | Comments (66)
May 05, 2008
Daisy pattern
To fit size: 32 (34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 48, 52) inches
Finished size: 33.5 (36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46.5, 50.5, 54.5) inches
For days which appear, through a window, glorious, but on venturing out are found to be cooled by a breeze. Elbow length sleeves, v-necked, invisible fastening and fabric binding to back neck.
Knit in Rowan Wool Cotton, a 50% wool/50 % cotton blend with a stated tension of 22-24sts x 30-32 rows over 4 inches. 50gm (113 metres (123 yards) x 9 (10, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) balls.
Skills: Knit and purl stitches, slipped stitches, working a hem, increases, decreases, yarnovers, sewn buttonloops, sewn-on binding
NB: Read more about the method used for sewing the buttonholes here.
£3.50 - you will be sent a link to download the pattern as an electronic (pdf) file, approx 1.8Mb
For more photos, see my previous entry here
Elsa was down early: she waited on the folding chair, set up in the herb garden outside the kitchen door, for the first signs of tea. Alas, great aunt Dilys was visiting, down from Somerset, so the afternoon’s activity had been curtailed.
She didn’t really mind. She had spent the greater part of the day lying flat on her stomach on one of the unmade beds in the spare room, where the stairs ran up to the attic. A favourite passtime was to grab at random one of the endless boxes of ephemera that the attic could yield, and bring it down to sort through, rescuing anything that needed rescuing, consigning to the waste basket anything irredeemably decayed. Once she had found a bundle of correspondence between mother and father, sent, from the dates, well before they were married. She read two paragraphs of one letter before yelping and blushing furiously, stuffing the letters back in their box and labelling with large letters ‘LOVE MISSIVES – MA AND PA. DO NOT READ’.
Today she had found a scuffed box, papered with a dusty snakeskin print carefully labelled ‘Daisy. Treasures, 1949’. A yellowed, folded poison-pen letter, worn soft and battered on the edges, threatened parents with ugly death should they fail to grant Daisy her only demand and send her to boarding school. The glue on some of the letters had come unstuck. The message had perhaps never been sent: or, more likely, had been delivered, read, and returned to sender with a sigh.
From her deckchair, Elsa observed the bees, newly busy with the spring flowers. There would be honey, melting through the holes of a crumpet, for tea; although Elsa would have to restrain herself, being in company, from wiping her finger through the honeyed, buttery goop left on her plate before sucking on it.
Soon after that, she would be able to slip away, unnoticed. She could avoid the talcum-powder and handbag smelling kisses goodbye – great aunt Dilys’s visits were a great performance in terms of preparation and maneouvering her from car to seat and back to car, but never lasted long – and stretch her legs with a walk as the lengthening evening turned the sky to violet.
Posted by Anna at 06:36 PM | Comments (4)