Shetland Fine Lace - Ep. 64 - Fruity Knitting

[Music] do [Music] welcome to fruity knitting this is episode 64 and i'm andrea and i'm andrew and you will have seen from the title that we're featuring shetland fine lace knitting in this episode so we have an interview with two shetland sisters ann janssen and kathleen anderson who are considered to be expert lace knitters in shetland they're quite well known and during the shetland wool week they were giving classes in advanced lace knitting so in the interview they talk about some of their favorite traditional shetland lace stitch patterns and how they like to use them and how they like to combine them to create the most amazing and intricate fine lace shawls which you'll totally love so both women are very charming it was one of my personal favorite interviews to have done and i think you're really going to enjoy them yep we're also going to meet marie green as our guest in knitters of the world we've got a couple more of our memories from shetland to share with you and we've also got two finished projects that show off in bring and brag and i think we're going to start with that with me yes yay andrew has finally finished his fingerless gloves that's right mittens so this is the chili pods to mix by glenna c it's a free pattern available on ravelry you can find it there as you can see it is a fingerless glove but it has this little flip top head over the top so when it's really cold you can pop your fingers away and there they are and i've said before the reason i really want these gloves is that when we go walking out in the cold in germany it does get down below zero and we're still out there um and i have to use the camera i can flip the top off and there's my fingers and i can do everything we need to do with the camera we're very coordinated which is you're a wizard doing these hand modelling dials i can see a career in that for you i'm a good prop assistant um so that's that i've knitted it in the dk hebrew dianyan from the yorkshire wildlife trust which we've spoken about before on the show it's a good rustic yarn it's also the same yarn as my hiking jacket so i'm going to be terribly well coordinated when i'm out there it was a pretty tricky knit for me i don't think it's really hard but it is it has lots of intricate bits and there's no not many sort of long stretches where you just get to relax and so that was a little bit of a challenge for me but i got there in the end um i do feel like it's maybe a little bit small this cap over the top seems to grab my fingers a little bit much you've said that we can probably get a bit of space out yeah when we when we block it you can definitely get a centimeter wider in that for sure but i would just hold off on that because yeah it's different when your hands are cold that's right who knows what i want when we're out there in the snow so i'm gonna i think that's a good idea we'll wait and i'm really looking forward to trying these out in the field dolls yes [Laughter] yay well done because that's quite a tricky knit and this wool is it's rustic and it can split a little bit so you've done well yep but it's it's it's also really hard wearing which is great because it means you know if you're holding a dirty dog lead or picking up some snow yeah and it's really appropriate that's how it is well done so that's finished i've now moved on to another sock for andrea yes he owes me a sock everybody jump on one sock that's right every jumper i knew him he has to knit me a sock and actually he's got another more exciting project but we're waiting for the yarn to come yep we're up to under construction with me i'll show you where i'm at with andrew's jumper try not to poke him in the eyes while i'm doing it no i think that's fine so you can see that i've knitted the body in the round up to the armholes and same with the both sleeves and what's really cool about this design is that the color work stops in a straight line right across the body and the sleeves together i think that's a really cool idea that's brilliant darling yeah but it's not my design it's jade star moore's design and so i've taken her pattern which is written as a cardigan for for a woman um and i'm making it into a gentleman's jumper i always love it when you say that though yes anyway so the big thing here is that now that i it was pretty free sailing up to the arm holes but now i have to rewrite everything to do with the arm holes upwards and that's because i've taken the size large because that fits andrew's chest size but a woman who wears size large will not be as wide in the upper body and the shoulders as andrew is so that means if i was to write the pattern as written his shoulder seam here wouldn't sit on his shoulders it would be somewhere halfway between his shoulders and his neck and it would end up being a bit like this not a good look so good and not a good friend feel so that's why i have to rewrite it so i thought i'd just show you how i go about re modifying a pattern for setting sleeves which is the tricky part and so i've done a few diagrams which i hope you find relatively understandable they're in centimeters but it applies just the same with um inches as well so the first thing you do need to know is the chest measurement and i've done it up in the round so far but from now on i'll be knitting it flat so any measurements that i give you is just either for the front or the back piece before you start doing any calculations at all you need to know your row gauge which will give you the length and your stitch gauge which will give you the width they're absolutely important so andrew's measurement across the chest for the front piece is 53 centimeters the next measurement i need to know is the upper back which on andrew is 42 centimeters so i have 153 stitches at the chest and i need to decrease down to 121 stitches for the upper back so that means i need to decrease 32 stitches and that's 16 stitches at each armhole and the armholes usually decrease over a length of four to seven centimeters and i'm going to decrease over five and a half centimeters which means in my gauge 22 rows so if you just think of looking at one side at a time that means i'm decreasing 16 stitches over 22 rows and you can plot the the decreases on a graph paper if you want to just to make sure you get that really nice smooth slope but what i'm doing is the initial bind off is usually one and a half to two and a half centimeters followed by successively fewer stitches and ending with just a few single stitch bind offs so i am decreasing six stitches in my first cast off which is two centimeters then i'm decreasing three stitches which is one centimeter and then one stitch three times and then every alternate row one stitch four times so that's fairly simple but you can see that that gives it a really nice curve so doing the decreases on the body and getting that really nice slope is fairly simple but it is somewhat tricky to make sure that your sleeve caps are going to fit into your sleeve armholes there's a few things that you have to follow but it is really important and i forgot to say it earlier that the upper body the upper shoulder measurement and is really important and the depth of the armhole is really important these these things you really have to work on for instance if the upper body is too wide then it will end up meaning that you have too much fabric underneath the arm and the sleeve shaping itself will look more like a modified drop shoulder than a set in sleeve and in contrast if the upper body is too narrow as it would be written for a female then what it will do is it pulls the shoulder seam up over the shoulder so it actually pulls the cap of the sleeve up over the shoulder which has the result of also making the sleeves too short so all of these considerations have to be taken into consideration into consideration absolutely so here's two more diagrams for you which i hope you can understand in general the sleeve cap needs to be around five to ten centimeters shorter than the armhole depth on the body so for andrew i'm going to make his sleeve cap seven centimeters shorter than his armhole depth which means the cap depth will be 15 centimeters which equals 61 rows you can see the cap on the setting sleeve is sort of shaped a bit like a bell and you can divide the cap into around four different sections to help you understand how to go about placing the decreases so the first thing that's easiest to do is to go to the first section and that's the initial bind off and that should mirror the shaping on the body armholes for at least the first couple of offs so i will cast off six stitches and then three stitches and then one stitch three times at the beginning of the row and if you remember that's exactly what i did at the start of my body shaping on the armhole you then go to the fourth section which is the final bind off and generally this should be around a quarter of the upper arm width so andrew's arm width is 35 centimeters so that means the final bind off needs to be around eight centimeters wide which is for my gauge 22 stitches so the next thing you can do is you go to the section three which is the top slope which has a fairly steep curve and it's worked over the last around one and a half centimeters length of the cap and it takes off around two and a half centimeters off the width of each side of the cap that that's sort of just roughly so again you work this out with your row and stitch count and i adjusted the stitch count slightly which you can do you do have freedom to do that so i'll cast off 16 stitches over six rows so then it comes to the second section which is the biggest section and the section that you've actually got more freedom to play with so you take the number of stitches in the upper arm and subtract the stitches that you will cast off in sections one three and four and that'll give you the number of stitches that you need to decrease in section two for andrew that's 38 stitches you do the same with the row count so that that means that you take the total needed row count and you minus the rows that you used up in section one three and four and what's left is your row count and for andrew that is 44 rows so that works out as decreasing one stitch at each end roughly every alternate row and that's what you can play around with so that's my process of modifying a garment with set in sleeves that's knitted bottom up and i hope that you've got the basic concept for how i work it out and that's helpful for you even though it's andrew's measurements and it's all in centimeters and i know a lot of you on the other side of the pond like to use inches but the concept is the same yeah those they were quite intimate details you were giving out there which is you know can we maybe do it again just not with any numbers i think it's good to see some numbers because then you actually see it in well i suppose i mean the other side of it is we've we've now shown everyone how to custom modify a jumper so that it fits me it works for any any set in sleeve jumper doesn't it yeah so everyone's able to knit me jumpers so if you want to make a jumper to fit me you can send it in and i guess the fair deal is that i would have to knit a pair of socks for whoever says you're digging a grave here i know it's a little a little bit risky there's a lot of knitters out there and one little me knitting socks i think we should move on yeah we have a couple more lovely memories of shetland that we wanted to share with you in this episode i've spoken about james rebanks booker shepard's life a few times on the show before but very quickly for new viewers if you haven't read the book it's a great well-written deeply insightful account of a shepherd's a sheep farmer's life and james writes in the book the importance of the yearly competition and auction and in shetland the the one uh or major um auction event also happened during the the wool week so having read the book both of us reading the book and feeling like we had a a deeper insight into the life and passions of a sheep farmer we were really excited to go to the auction and check it out and it just so happened in the auction that i sat next to the farmer hamish who won the show overall top show sheep champion so i um asked him lots of questions and tried to pre um pick his brains and despite my probably annoying questions he was extremely polite and friendly a lovely man he was sitting there with his family of three lovely redhead little girls with their overalls and they're all red yeah they're looking great yeah and their wellington's wellington boots on it's a real exciting atmosphere the auction and so he won the show champion but also quite a few other first prizes in different categories and i asked him it's funny i asked him if he was happy with the price that he got for the show at champion and he said he was completely thrilled it was a top prize and everything was great but you ca and you'll see him very soon you can't see that on his face at all he's absolutely poker-faced why the bidding's going on and the bidding is very exciting so we've just got a two-minute section to show you of the sale of this top sheep and you'll see hamish in the pen he's the sort of more stockier slightly older man standing at the back very poker face you can't tell that he's excited or not excited about the price and there's another younger man and his his job is to keep the sheep moving in the pan so that all the farmers get to have a look and and can really judge him and most of the sheep in the auction are just being sold as good tough healthy breeding stock for the rest of the uk and scotland but the bidding is really interesting because you can't see who's bidding there's i was desperately trying to find who's doing the bidding because they're very almost like just little nods or movements of the head or eyes or something but the bidding's happening happening quite fast which really adds to the drama of it all right so we've got a two-minute segment um of the show champion sheep getting sold and we hope you enjoy time for it [Applause] here this time are we going to be at i can suggest maybe three thousand three thousand under it's only one champion i do keep reminding you every year there's only one overall shop in two thousand 500 anybody else fight fifty five fifty six hundred six hundred seven eight hundred nine hundred one thousand one hundred twelve hundred twelve hundred eight or twelve hundred twelve hundred twelve hundred and twelve hundred twelve hundred twelve hundred sunday are traveling [Music] [Music] anybody else to one twenty five hundred twenty two hundred twenty three twenty four hundred two thousand five hundred two six two seven two eight two eight two thousand years help me follow [Music] [Music] i think that another scene that we would like to share with you today is um we we're going to meet kathleen anderson very shortly in our interview we spoke to kathleen she loves to go hiking with her husband around shetland we met the two of them and they actually said they've walked along most of the coastline of shetland which is pretty amazing given that shetland there's a lot of coastline in shetland with all the little islands so they know their way around so we asked them for recommendations and one of the places that kathleen recommended was a place called westerwick which is coming up very shortly but before that and actually before we got to westwick we went to a place called carlswick which is very close by we went for a little wander there and we came across this beautiful old stone building look quite simple um we found out it's actually from 1893. we went around the back and it's got this lovely red door which is very inviting it's you know essentially says please come in yeah so we did try this door and it was open and it turned out it is this beautiful church with this stunning wooden paneling on the side really thick walls and these big deep window sills window yeah windowsills um pant wood paneling these little wooden um traditional pews there but it also had a very old it was a 19th century pump organ up the front beautifully carved yes it's all carved out of wood and sitting there in the corner and andrea being a pianist had a go i play to him yeah as a henry i play to him we've got a little bit of footage of that it is a pump organ and andrea is sitting there you can't exactly see it but pumping with their feet it was quite noisy and it is quite noisy it's an old thing and it's probably not in the best condition but it did play so here's the little memory yep [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Applause] [Music] know [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] know [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] my lover they never answer i'm always [Music] here far too late [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] what of the promise to bring is [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello my name is marie green i am a knitwear designer and knitting teacher in the pacific northwest oregon and my business is olive knits my passion is for seamless sweaters i love really classic minimal styles you can see this one right behind me is very indicative of my work it's top down it's seamless it's got a really crisp clean aesthetic and that's what i really love and i'd love to show you a little bit more about my work and also tell you a little bit more about how i got started as both a knitter and a designer i began knitting as a child i was about 10 years old when my grandmother taught me and i think she saw in me just this real desire to keep my hands busy and to always be creative i had always been into things like sewing and embroidery and cooking and really anything that was creative and gave me a chance to explore and try out different things so when she taught me to knit it just immediately felt right i absolutely loved doing it and throughout my young life i was just always knitting and i grew up not knowing really any other knitters so it always felt really unusual to be pulling out my knitting as a child and people would look at me and give me strange looks so for a while i thought i was you know this dying breed and it was only as i got older that i discovered this amazing fiber industry and that there are millions of us and it was such a lovely discovery to realize i wasn't alone but i i didn't really fall in love with sweaters until i was a little bit older most of my young knitting was spent knitting barbie clothes and baby booties and little small things because that's really all i had ever seen and most of the books i had had these designs that were just not what i was looking for they were they were much older styles and although they really inspired me i could never find something that was quite what i was looking for so i didn't really discover my love for sweaters until i was about in my my late 20s early 30s and i started just sort of creating patterns that had the look that i wanted and that was i guess the beginning of me being a designer because i just kept realizing that if i want a specific style maybe i just need to come up with it myself and for a lot of years i just was designing for myself and my family and not really ever thinking of turning them into patterns and putting them out into the world and it was only five or six years ago when knitters started seeing me in my sweaters and asking me about them that i thought let's let's give this a try and it's been such a fun adventure my design philosophy is really pretty simple i love seamless design i i just it really fits the way that i knit and the way that i think i'm a very on the go knitter and i love to be able to just stick my knitting in my bag and take it with me wherever i go and so having projects that i can pick up and put down without having to really fuss over where i am in the pattern or worry about checking a chart that's always been really important to me and it and it works so well um with seamless sweaters so that's what's probably really made me fall in love with them and then when i'm finished i'm finished but i've i've also realized there are some inherent challenges to seamless sweaters and so because of that i've really loved exploring this design style and finding new ways to create better fit and better structure and just overall create a better sweater but that it just so happens it doesn't have seams and i want to share a few of those pieces with you today and just tell you a little bit about what i've done with them this sweater is called sandscape and one of the things i really love about it is this slip stitch detail down the front it's just very clean and very simple but that placement gives you a nice vertical visual and it gives you a little something fun to do while you're working the sweater but it becomes very intuitive and it means that you can do a lot of that mindless social knitting that i personally love so much but still get this really beautiful result for a sweater that's so classic and something that you can just really wear with practically anything and i incorporated the slip stitches not only down the front but also down the arms and on the back so you get a little bit of that fun um really clean almost embossed texture so it's just a hint of it and a little a little detail that just keeps it interesting without being too busy and another thing that i really love about this one is it's a good way to show you some of that arm shaping that i love to do and it's it's just this really clean sort of elegant shaping around the arm that creates this really lovely fit that almost feels sudden but is actually not a sudden sleeve but it does end up feeling that way when you're wearing it so you can kind of see that more on the front as well this next piece that i want to show you is my beekeeper cardigan and this one is a lot of fun because it's part of our year two four day nedling and we you know the goal of the four day midline really isn't to knit it in four days necessarily it's just to to challenge yourself to knit a sweater more quickly than you've knitted in the past and so we had a lot of fun with people at all skill levels and all time frames working on this sweater this year and i incorporated a few really fun techniques to make this a a sweater that works really well for efficient knitting and a couple of those are no buttons on the button band and that has proven to be a time saver just naturally because you don't have to work those buttonholes and or attach the buttons um a shorter length so the cropped length i just personally love wearing cropped length sweaters anyway because i'm short wasted i'm a tall person but i have a short waist and um and then three quarter sleeves which are obviously another time saver but another thing i did with this sweater which i thought was really important is that because it doesn't have buttons and because it's top down and seamless and because there's a little bit of silk in the fiber that i used i wanted to make sure i was really careful about the construction around the shoulders and the upper back because i want the sweater to stay on so i created this sort of um crazy mock saddle that was really really narrow at top and then it branches out over the arms but it just hugs the shoulders so beautifully and it means that the sweater really stays on regardless of the fact that there aren't these other things in place that usually will keep your shoulder on and in the back a little bit you can sort of see that i've really brought these raglan edges back and there's just this little tiny saddle shoulder there and then this sleeve if you look there kind of morphs down from there into a proper sleeve but that narrower construction at the top really helps that sweater to stay on this sweater is another fun one and it's got a little bit of everything that i love it's top down it's seamless i picked up the neckline afterwards which i do from almost all of my sweaters because i think it adds that extra structure gives you a little bit of control over the neckline which i love doing after the fact and then deciding you know how much i want that neckline to come up for me and but at the same time it has this really modern fun twist on the front and so what i did was i worked it in the round to about here and then i cast on extra stitches and began working flat in order to create this lace panel that's in the front and the lace panel crosses over a panel of seed stitch so that juxtaposition of a really dense seed stitch with a really wavy kind of light lace mini panel creates this fun offset front there's no short rows no other interesting shaping it's completely just that difference between what happens with lace and what happens with the denser stitch pattern and it's a really fun visual as well when i try and talk to people about how much lace will grow and how much you know cables or dense texture don't i like to say the eyelet giveth and the cable taketh away and that same philosophy is true here which is how we get this fun shaping and so this front panel is actually separate and open and i just tacked it down afterwards at the angle that i liked and this sweater is called washed ashore this design is called lada and it's one of my absolute favorites because it really embodies my design aesthetic it's minimalist with a few very strategic lovely details and it's very wearable you may recognize this from line and magazine issue five it was a real honor to be included i i love this piece because of just these these this juxtaposition of um texture up top with reverse stockinette and these twisted knit stitch details that sort of remind me of raindrops dribbling down window panes and i also love this plate in the front i thought that was just a fun way to add a little extra room in the body without any complicated shaping in general i would say i'm a sweater knitter first and foremost i love sweaters very passionate about them and my design philosophy is really to design things that are not only fun to make but also very wearable i'm very conscientious about what knitters are really going to be able to wear what will i want to wear you know what's going to work in my closet and work with my body type and so i'm always looking at ways to create patterns that are going to give knitters not just a great experience to knit but a very practical end result that they're going to love and so if you love your sweater in the end and you wear it a lot that's a success in my book and that's really my mission as a designer to create sweaters that knitters are going to love to wear and get a lot of use out of [Music] thank you marie for your contribution i thought it was really interesting the visual description of that pattern washed ashore that's the one that's asymmetrical so you've got the front lace panel because it's looser just naturally becoming longer and the underneath panel which is in a moss stitch pulling pulling the fabric in slightly shorter and more dense but that really showed off well there i thought that was cool so thanks marie and marie is offering fruity knitting patrons a 25 discount of all of her self-published patterns in her ravelry store and top-down and seamless constructions are something that many knitters really enjoy doing and marie loves designing sweaters and cardigans and has a heap of them for you to choose from and i think many of them are really suitable for less experienced knitters and like marie said she puts a lot of care into writing clear no stress patterns that fit really well so enjoy looking through her store so now it's up to the patron speech yay in a nutshell thank you so much to all of our wonderful faithful generous patrons who have supported the show so that there are now 64 episodes out for everyone to view without your support this show would not have happened so thank you so much yeah that's really true it is however also true that we do need to increase the level of support so that we can make the production of the show really something that's sustainable for us on going into the future yeah so if you are a regular viewer please do become a patron you can do so for a small amount yep thank you thank you we're quickly going back to bring and brag because i've got a finished project it's a sewing project it's not a knitting project this is a knitting podcast so i'll be brief but it is my tweet that i bought at jamisons of shetland in shetland and i thought you might like to see that it's been completed into a successful skirt so it's an a-line skirt very simple with a yoke and a zipper in the center center of the back there i have used this pattern before it's the mccall's m7022 and i've actually even used it on shetland tweed before but i was just too adventurous in my last attempt i tried to cut the fabric on the skirt on on the bias so that it would be more drapey but the problem with that is that it made my zipper not lie flat it was always wavy and i took the zipper out multiple times and despite reinforcing the zipper in all different ways i couldn't get rid of the of the wave or the bumpy zipper so i thought this time because the material is so precious i wasn't going to be adventurous and i was just going to follow the pattern exactly and it worked so it lies really flat on me which is lovely and you can see i've got the same color zipper which is cute the pattern did didn't say to put lining in but i have so you can see there do you want to have one of your hands of course so you can see i've put lining in which is nice and i think it's nice to put lining in because for two reasons you don't want the tweed wool to sort of stick on your stockings and ride up or cling to your legs and also in winter it just makes it extra warm so it was very easy very sort of successful there's the the lining underneath the yarns that they use in their weaving material are the same yarns that they use in the knitting material and if you look closely you can see the same colors that they have and i think they've got over 220 colors in their whole range and it's just a different ply so you can actually make yourself a jamisons of shetland skirt go with your jamisons of shetland jumper which i am actually wearing so i don't know if you can see it down there but it's perfectly matchy-matchy beautiful it's very exciting to walk around in a completely jammy sense of shetland outfit so i'm pleased that i didn't stuff this one up and i've got material to make madeleine one so um i'll make her one too so there we go yep we would like to remind our shetland patrons that we have a live event this coming saturday with louisa harding who we interviewed back in episode 59. yeah louisa is highly trained and experienced as a designer and she's held head designing positions with major magazines and yarn companies and she's also very open and friendly so you'll get to ask her lots of questions so remember to put that date in your calendar and send in your questions for her to look over as soon as you can yeah that's going to be a really great event so it's up to the interview now you're going to find ann and kathleen totally charming it was great fun to do this interview and right at the end and tells you a really funny story which you're going to find hilarious so and i'm sure by the end of it you're going to have a completely new appreciation of fine lace knitting so enjoy it and we'll see you in two weeks yeah thanks for being with us today we'll see you in two weeks time bye [Music] no more but i'll never forget your kindness [Music] glass is [Music] upon she trains [Music] welcome to fruity knitting i'm in shetland and with me today are two shetland sisters ann janssen and kathleen anderson who are both very well known expert lace knitters and both ann and kathleen learned to knit very early in life and like a lot of shetlanders during that time they knitted as children for to supplement the family income and over the years they've become quite expert in a few different techniques including uh machine knitting and spinning but they're really fine and intricate lace work is extraordinary and they've brought a lot of that today to show us so we're in for a real treat so i just want to say thank you so much for agreeing to come on fruity knitting kathleen and anne it's super to have you here and i can just see this so much amazing lace work here to show so i'm so excited well we're happy to be here it's a pleasure to be here good so both of you are two sisters out of four sisters so i thought we might start with just a little bit of knitting or family knitting history can you say something about what your mother and her sisters were likely to have been knitting and then what you both knitted as children and then later as teenagers and then how or when you finally got into this amazing intricate lace work well our mother i would have classed her as a lace knitter because that's what she usually did and this is what she would have done when we were children she was always knitting yes lace cardigans but she would started working in 80s of all was a big network for him down involved where they left so her and her sisters were there and she would have been doing the hand netting as they all were at one time until the machine comes came in and late twenties when the first nut machine came to vote so some of the ladies they were taught there by a lady who come up from liverpool to teach the first one to knit on the machine okay and after that the refuse got going two of our ants knitted on the machine at all but our mother never did so she just mainly concentrated on hand knitting and the lace this is really beautiful what is this stitch pattern here this is what our mother called the palm beach okay yeah although in pattern books you can see it called a different name yeah but we always call it the palm beach is that what we knew it is that was one of her favorite patrons it was yes that's a very gorgeous jacket that's a that's an adult a female adult jacket isn't it that's one she it's one she let it for me when i was probably in my 20s yeah so what were you knitting as children i thought you said once that you were knitting vests well that was that was the first thing i can remember knitting i can remember us all sitting at night the three of us um and and the boys yeah the boys the two yeah were brothers at we would award i can't actually remember wearing them but we obviously did wear them that's the first thing i remember nothing and then uh later on when mother learned us to knit we feral mets yeah for kids and that would have been the first things that we would have sold and gotten money for okay and were you about eight or nine then no i i think i would be probably 12 13 when i wanted the first thing to sell and just going back quickly to the vests was that just um garter stitch yeah just garter stitch and then just for people who don't know what a vest is that's um it's like a singlet or a spencer isn't it it's a warm undergarment to put under your shirt or something yeah yeah great so you all you also did um pharah quite a lot of feral were you doing that as teenagers yes the only first thing i was doing was little mints okay i'd never got much further than that with me yeah i i remember my first fair isle probably when i was a teenager and it was black and white i've still got it actually but i got it in acrylic yarn really yeah something i would like to use new but that was my first but i've i've knitted yeah i remember knitting feral cardigan for my mom and a few of them myself and i still looked in it fair isle okay but lace is my sort of passion so when did the lace start well my first memory a lace was when i was in primary school and we used to get knitting in primary school at that time and i'd finished my project at school and my mother knew the knitting teacher and she knew she had this part in the bird's eye and she wanted to learn it and so she suggested that i asked to do the bird's eye and i had no idea what the birds eye was like so i being the dutiful daughter i said yes i would [Laughter] um and the bird's eye if you know that it's not an easy part and it's certainly not a beginner's pattern and at that time the patterns were all written out like knit two there was no graph and it's all written out the long hand so and i struggled and i would knit a piece and have to rip it back and knit a piece under that but eventually i got it made and then i taught my mother how to knit it okay she couldn't follow a pattern yeah she had to have the knitted um people yeah and then she could copy it from that okay so if she had this in front of her she could read what was going on and then copy it yeah and so she made a hundreds of uh bird sized scarf she was still knitting them up until the time that she died oh because of you all because of me yeah well you both really well known as amazing lace knitters so and you both love it that you both love lace above everything else don't you yep well i i do and i think my mom was happy that we were carrying on the last tradition yeah yeah well i thought it would be really interesting to you as viewers if i asked kathleen and anne to show us around six really typical shetland lace stitch patterns just so that we can get an idea of what typical ones that we used and then they could tell us how they're constructed and how you can do variations on them and how they like to combine them together so we've got some here so i thought maybe we'll start with you anne what well the first one i'm going to start with is i think my favorite uh lace pattern was one of my favorites my mum's favorites was the print and the wave some people call it the print of the wave but my mom always called it the print and the wave and this is just a simple one this is actually a shawl my mum knitted for me when i was expecting my first child so this has been used as a baby shawl so this is the the basic print and the wave and then um so you quite often got it in the center of a shawl but it can be used this is a fancier one this has got the two lobes and that makes a nice etching for the shawl yeah it's beautiful and then you can get the even fancier ones got three lobes um so that makes it beautiful um so it's a very it's a very versatile pattern and it's a very simple pattern because every second row is a plain row okay so you get a lot for your money in the print and the wave yeah yeah my um understanding was at this rep descent at the footprints in the sand and this is the waves that was my understanding of the pattern ah and this has to be another very common pattern you've got it both there the tree yeah yeah here your tree alive so that is used a lot in lace shawls and that's a quite easy pattern to knit it's very easy yeah very simple and and you can make it smaller or larger so again it's a very um handy pattern to know okay um so you can adapt it exactly and you can change the the size of it to suit what is sort of happening below it and above it so this is the bird's eye pattern i was um speaking with this is the first part that i i ever did and it's um every row is a pattern row and there's a lot of taken three togethers and these when it's made in fine cobweb like this quite often you ended up breaking your thread or something like i i know this off by half like the first row is uh yarn over yeah i don't know because you don't say yeah we say wool forward warfare yeah our cast stops would be the than way saying it has though okay um so so it's um yarn over knit three yarn over knit three together all the way along okay yeah so so how many rows in the actual uh pattern repeat it's it's a 10 row repeat um six stitches okay but you're all obviously it's really only five lo rolls that you need to learn yeah and two of that rows are the same anyway so there's not much you have to learn by this it's not my favorite pattern and i wouldn't um i wouldn't have put this pattern in the center of a shawl or anything it's nice and scarves but i do use it the individual motif i have quite often use it in shawls just this um okay so that's around the edging around the edges of the diamond yeah yeah that's beautiful i mean do you ever use lifelines no no you're too good and no sketch markers they don't watch me stitch markers so if you do a mistake first of all there's pattern on both sides isn't there so you never get a straight knit row no no and that not in this yeah and the other thing is there's no purl stitches is there no it's all garter yeah so you you're lovers of of knit stitches yes that's right yes we avoid puddling at all costs yes okay so most most uh shetland shores are based on the garter stitch is that right yeah all the traditional ones was garter stitching and you can see that on the edging can't you here so if you were to do a mistake do you just um do you rip all back or do you sort of just go down ladder down and fix that well i would i would just drop the wee piece and then knit it back up okay unless it was away you'd notice the mistake away further down then i'd just obviously just rip it back that's beautiful and here just on the edging uh is that also the birthday that's the bedside just one in there and this week part in here this is a handy weave pattern as well this is the the pity flee and and this is just um yarn over knit three together yarn over knit one and and every second row is plain so that's quite a handy one to have that's used a lot you'll see that a lot in shawls as fillers yeah yeah okay yeah so what have you got there kathleen well i have this one this is the alice mod patron and i first saw this in the heirloom knitting book and i've made it a lot in the center of shawl since then i think the pattern is about 36 stitches but it's a lovely pattern you can alter it you can either make it a bit wider or a bit narrower just by either putting on an extra yarn over two together foot extra or taking one out to make it a bit less so it's less of a wave or you can have more of a wave going up there and it's a pattern every row because i don't like purlin i hate pollen so much at this cardigan i made it in the round and i put it and cut it off so that's how my purlin your mother would be would have been horrified really so your mom did yes she did and her cat again she puddled so so that's alice mod so you can make you were saying you could make the zigzag section wider yes can you also make the inside sort of little diamond shape wider as well you could but i've never done that i just like that diamond the way it is yeah yes and i just like to alter the zigzag bit if i have to alter any of it yeah it's beautiful and have you used that at all on the edge or the border is that stitch pattern there in any way no no i've not done that in this board such but this is another little one this is uh the pity bead in diamond pity that's for little pity bead and diamond which i use as in the shawl it's going out around the edge there that's the pretty bead and diamond okay so it's a good thing to fill in too yes so what can you say about the yarns used here that looks slightly woollier i just wallet i can't really even remember what yarn this was but this one here this is a cashmere silk and wool okay and it's a bit slidy so it's a more awkward you have to be more careful when you're knitting with it if you drop a stitch it's a nightmare yeah it'll just shoot to the bottom yes it does for something boolier if you were to drop a stitch it doesn't have the same effect it's just going to go way down yeah so fast so was this a christening shawl or whatever yes it would be that would be the no use but every day this is the cockleshell scarf i've not really made many cockleshell scars but this one i did especially for the highlands show this past year so i put beads in it i think there's 350 beads in this and it took me over 50 hours to knit it and i got third prize at the highland show the only third prize so that was that one so but i think it's something that i would after doing this one it's something that i would do again and this one is done in this fine cashmere silken wool now usually when you're stretching a cockle shell what you would do you would just take the two points like each end together when you're washing it but with this fine yarn i thought to get rid of that marks it would be a problem so what i did i took a piece of cardboard which i shaped the ends before i stretched it so it took a bit of measuring and just sewed up other stitches yes very quick wow that's beautiful so what is your favorite yarn to to do very fine lace knitting in i do like less for very fine but the shetland supreme i do use it too and i quite like it sometimes it's nice to do something that is from shetland to work with this but lately i got such a big cone of this from a friend that i've made i don't know how many shawls using this yeah and that's the cashmere silk blade yes it's silk and wool yes it was sourced in italy you both spin don't you yeah i don't do as much spinning as i used to do but you used to do quite a spinner yeah and didn't you say was it you kathleen or one of you learned to spin simply so that you could get the fine lace that was me that was yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay when we were young we never tried to spin and wheel in our house but there was a neighbor not far away she i think they had three wheels yeah so we would go down with one mother visiting at night and that was going ootaboot the night [Laughter] mom would have taken a knitting beer they never went out anywhere at night without the nut and so she had been certain knitting and the lady down there we would have a go on the spinning wheel and i think we never did enough to even make wool to nitwit your king enough but i think just doing that when we came to try the spinning world well i just found you just talk to it right away because i suppose it's like cycling a bike yeah you learn when you're young you'll never forget it yeah yeah so it was a bit like that what i also i saw kathleen's work for the first time last year during the 2017 wool week and i was completely blown away it just stood out as being magnificent and and so intricate and beautiful and i thought we've got to have you both on the show sometime so it's great that you're here but i asked both both kathleen and ann to bring along two of their favorite designs to show you and talk about so how they've constructed so we'll we'll have a look at those now now this shawl when it's complete there is neither a cast iron stitch or a cast off stitch on it what we do is we start at the the lace h and we knit a few rows in a cotton thread then after that we get on to the lace age and we knit all around all the lace age and this one i know took me 28 hours to knit that lace age okay and then after that we start we pick up enough for the first quarter i think in this shawl it's 370 stitches and a quarter and knit it up and taken in shaping it all the way so that one quarter and you go on when you're finished your first quarter then you knit that holy roll and then you knit in your center the patterns in this is just bits and pieces i've taken from different shawls i did a black shawl last year and this bit here and that piece is from the quartus in the black shaw this scent bit here is from i did the stole a couple of years ago a commission that was done for the widow of famous pop artist roy liechtenstein i don't know if i'm saying the name right but anybody who knows they'll know who it is so that's where that patents came from and then of course this is the alice mod pattern so after i finish knitting the center then i go on and i graph the center to the which would have been the second quarter it's grafted on there and what i grafting is that holy roll that's the grafton draw that row of holes and what's amazing is it looks exactly the same as the the row where you picked up stitches to knit this it's you can't tell what's grafted and what's not crafted and then after that i'll graft up the four corners wow yeah the finishing is really important because if that's not done properly then you can spoil a garment absolutely we see that so oh yeah that's vital and that's some skill we learned from our mother absolutely yeah so we did yes so when you say finishing you're talking about things like grafting yes and and what else the the blocking as well but not only the grafting mainly the grafts mainly the grafting because when we were young we did learn to graph because that's another thing our mother did she used to graft we called it finishing she would get a bag with so many chompers to finish and that was grafting on the necks grafting on the cuffs and sewing them up and the rib at the bottom sewn it up and when we were came big enough that she could trust us then we would start and we would graft on a cough that was our start and that's how we learned to get out so we all did and it's something i absolutely still love doing really good after yeah and so who's the lucky person who's getting this well i don't know it's not made for anybody special if somebody came along and asked wanted to buy it they could at a price but at the moment they go on a box under the bed so if she gets cold the winter night she just pulls out one and someday when i'm gone and the daughters four daughters and i've ten grandchildren and they come to clear up and they'll find all the shawls on the debate so i hope there's one for each of them that's beautiful can you estimate how many hours it took you i didn't time myself really with this one but one knitted in the same yarn uh maybe two three year ago it was about near 150 hours yeah that's pretty fast that's actually pretty fast is it yeah and the most important bit is not in the least age yeah this one 28 hours i was just but that's pretty fast because there's a lot of stitches in this that's impressive i was thinking that you'd bought in my opinion my humble opinion i was expecting you to say you know more than that you know 250 or something oh yeah but see that's just was years of doing this yes yeah well one day it was the shetland guild of spinners weaver and dyer's tease this girl came up to me and asked if i could knit something for her to wear around their shoulders that they're waiting so i said yes and this uh i started to think about it dane and i it was a few sleepless nights i'll tell you because things would come in my head i would waken up but there's things that i could do how i could design this and so i started looking on it like panels going up where i started decreasing three by taking three three together at different points there and this is how it came about i started charting it down on this graph paper and working it out till it came up to the point at the neck yeah and how i went about i knitted the lace edge for it along the bottom and i think there's about nearly 500 stitches along the bottom i picked up all the lace age and start at netanyahu and continue the lace edge up each side going up each side until i came to about the last stitches at the neck i think it was about 73 stitches so from there when i'd finished that then i had to knit a piece of laser chain from that side and a piece of lace edge from that side so that's all the grafting i had to do in that was to graft that bits of lace h on and then graft up that little center piece and that's so delicate it just kind of sits like a little curtain around the shoulders yes and this is knitted in the shetland supreme yard and from jamisons and smith it's beautiful it's so that's so that came about and what what's the stitch pattern here that is shell grid is this sort of uh diamonds and you have different stitches yes and this is in there book if you look at that you'll get the shell grid and inside that you can just put any little pattern you want to so this is all different there's a little fair in here there's the pity flea and the pity bead and diamond and then some i'm not sure what it is just pulls in well this is the first hand spun shawl i ever made and i saw this a photo of this show in um a magazine yeah the new shetlander magazine and i just love the design i love the horseshoes and the stars and i thought well i really want to be able to knit that so i um started just playing the round we parked and see if i could recreate the first that i tried to do was the horseshoe and it took me ages to get it and the star was quite difficult but i really enjoyed because up until then i'd just been following and then i realized well hey it's not that difficult really to design your own stuff and and that really got me hooked on less when i saw the possibilities of how you could design your own and this was really why i learned to spin because my ambition was to spin enough yarn to knit a shawl like how it was done announced um all that years ago um and this is very fine and this is your spinning this is yeah this is a two-ply hand spun okay so you taught yourself this a horse sherlin star pattern based on that photo that yeah and what else is in here well we've got again we've got the bird's eye we've got the pity flea and we've got the spiders web which i that's a pattern i don't like knitting but i like i like the look of it and this here i was just needing something to fill in there so i just made that up okay just i need this up and the other fall in yeah that's very beautiful so did you in the original design was this the pattern that they had in the center yeah and you and you you didn't know how to do the spiderweb before you just looked at it and figured it out yeah that's so clever i don't know i bet you i bet your learning curve on lace i mean you would have to to have got through that from just a photo you would have taught yourself so much oh yeah it was a challenge but it's it's less is not as difficult as it looks well i think it's um when you break it down to two units yeah because it's only it's only simple stitches only like um wool forward and knit two together will follow three together it's just simple stitches i think the hardest thing is probably the planning not the actual knitting but the planning to think okay how is it going to look balanced how many stitches do i need if i'm decreasing what's a good pattern that's going to fit in in that amount of stitches and so when i designed this one i would just knit it a straight swatch like this to see how the patterns were going to work good and yeah i sometimes still do that but this this would have been before the days of graphene um uh charts doing oh okay yeah so then they chart it so we just made so yeah i just and i would look at the swatch so you did the swatch and then you'd always go back to it for reference yeah okay yeah it's beautiful it's really beautiful okay now tell us also about the design that you were commissioned to do by the museum oh yeah i don't know that's my beef but 18 years ago um i was the girl to spin this waifus when they actually owned and ran the museum but the texas museum and they asked if i would knit a veil for for their collection i thought well yeah i would do that and one of the other members she spun the yarn she spun this beautiful two-ply yarn and i thought well i really need to do justice as this yarn i'm not just going to to knit a square shawl and turn it into a veil so i um initially i didn't know how i was going to shape it because i had nothing to um copy yeah yeah and i wanted it so it was long and right down to the ground um so i thought well if i make like too long like quarters that could go up either side of the shawl either side of the veil yeah and then i knit a long thin triangle that came up between them and went over the head and the lace edge would carry on up around and that's that's today that's my favorite piece and i've ever done so that's in the collection at the board and how long did it take you oh i have no idea a long time a long time as i suppose the biggest piece of knitting i've done really yeah that's great so what i also think is really interesting is that both of you have done quite a lot of machine knitting so how did you first get interested in machine knitting and also how do you feel about it in comparison to hand knitting well i got into sheen because at one time well i used to do finishing for a firm and do so many jumpers every week and then that was in decline and that's when i learned that my first show was 40 years ago but two years later i thought oh i would phone around and see if there was any finishing to be had because i would love to do that again but no there wasn't much of that but uh smiths of sandwich asked if i would take a little machine from them and if i would fud so that's what i did so i got this machine and i knitted for them i think for about 10 years okay that's when you would get it but come on a bus and you would get this big bundle a wool on a thirsty night i think it used to arrive and all through the week you would knit this 20 jumpers the next thursday that would go back on the bus and at night you would get another load of wool and i really i loved that i really loved it yeah and what about you well my first job when i left school um like we left in vo um the only job sorted in that area was at tm areas and sons like where where mother and aunts had worked when they were young so i went there to work on a nutting machine like the big rebates dubiads and i don't work there probably about five years and i really really enjoyed it but when i left there i thought that's it i won't be having a knife machine because they're so big and like first thorn in your house and then a few years back i sort of had a midlife crisis and i decided i would go and do the contemporary textile course at the college here and then lo and behold there was the same machines that i'd been working on at 80s and also the domestic like um computerized machines and i mean i had been aware of that computerized machines um because my sister-in-law had one and neighbors help them but i always thought their unless should be hand-knitted yeah but when i got to play on them at the college i thought wow these machines are just brilliant yeah so now i've actually got i've got three different machines in my house again we've rebated machines yeah so we're going to finish off now with something really extraordinary and a lot of fun anne here has knitted herself a garden fence and she knitted it out of strong black fishing net twine so that's amazing we'll show you some pictures of it but so and you have to tell us how did you knit it as in what kind of things did you knit it with how long did it take and of course we definitely want to know what shetland lace stitch pattern you used well the reason i knitted it initially was because i'd moved into that house a few years ago and i'd had a chain link black chain link fence and i hated it and i thought well what could how can i get a new fence and it's going to be cheap and i could do it myself and the original had like angle iron uprights and a top and a bottom wire and i thought well perfect for a frame for putting on a lesson and i thought well i need something that um that's going to be durable so i just went to the net menu store and came back with this polypropylene twine and i mentioned to my sort of mr fixit man who does uh odd jobs and things i mentioned to him site i was thinking of fans yeah and so the next week he came and i said i needed big knitting needles so the next week he came along with this beautiful pair of knitting needles that he made from an old curtain pole a wooden curtain pole so i got started and um i thought the pact perfect pattern my favorite pattern would be the print and the wave which is so it's just a long strip of the printing way it goes it was only 23 stitches so it's and it i can't mind how many meters it was but it only took me about three weeks to knit it okay um you must have looked so funny did you see that no no i didn't no i sat in my house and i knitted it and i knit it as much as i thought oh well i'm sure this might stretch so the the guy who made my needles he came and helped me put it in situ and [Music] when i was when i was getting to the end i thought oh no i'm going to have to knock a few more rows and i think i hate a nitty-gritty so i hate to sit on a wee box on the pavement in the last six rows probably thought i was a bit mad that's such a brilliant story yeah and has anybody else taken it on you haven't started a craze here no no um no my garden is too big it's a brilliant idea when you've already got the frame yeah i mean that is um five six years since it went and it's still just as it was so it should last a long time yeah well we have to say goodbye now but it's been so much fun just being with both of you here and seeing your amazing work and hearing about it and yeah and especially your funny story so thanks to both of you for agreeing to come on fruity knitting awesome thank you it's been a pleasure so we'll say goodbye to the viewers bye [Music] it was on one bright march morning [Music] no [Music] which [Music] i stepped on board [Music] [Applause] [Music] and i laid me down again all strangers here no friends to me till a dark girl towards [Music] [Music] train [Music] i said [Music] again [Music] [Music] she drank she took me to her mommy's house and she treated me quite well [Music] to try and paint [Music] she said it could never be for she had got another [Music]

Channel: Fruity Knitting

Views: 102,541

Keywords: Knitting, Shetland, Lace

Id: ad4cDZHtCOA

Length: 79min 53sec (4793 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018