Home from London and new yarn

I got back from London Wednesday night. Almost at once I hit the home grounds I took the dogs for a long walk and it got me rooted back into my own surroundings. The weather home was still very warm and after a nice 8 km stroll, my soul had landed too and it was easy to fall into home routines. After the walk I sat down at my own kitchen table to sort out the mail with a cup of strong coffee.

Do you have your own set of home-coming routines? Walk with the dogs, mail and coffee does it for me...

London was good in every single way, even the weather that was quite chilly compared to ours (yes, truly!!) was just perfect for a knitting happening.  It was raining quite hard while I visited the market place thus making sense to me why I needed more yarn.

The atmosphere around KnitNation was very friendly, everyone seemed happy and relaxed and enthusiastic to learn new things and just to enjoy the knitting fumes. All the students in my classes were extremely nice, they seemed to be able to follow my accent-English and helped me every once in a while when I got stuck or needed guidance in finding the right terms. I cannot thank them enough for their friendliness and patience. (Those of you who were in my mitten class, I now have sent all the emails with the Inari pattern to you, two of my emails got bounced back. If you have not received your pattern and wish to do so, please send me a message through Ravelry (lenealve in Rav) with your e-mail and I will send you the pattern soonest.)

One of the highlights of my London trip was a visit to Tate Modern to see the Miró exhibition. I took the audio tour and it was really interesting to listen to what was told about the individual paintings plus to hear some extra information about his life.

Since getting back I have not been knitting that much, there has been other things to occupy the hours so I will show you some yarn I got while in London.

First of all I received a beautiful gift from the Portuguese knitters and was taught to knit the Portuguese way. I am going to try it, since the method seems to be quite fast and the wrist movements are kept to a minimum. On the days when I knit a lot, my wrist sort of gets sore, nothing bad, but then I usually go from picking method to throwing just to change the movements, but now I can also knit Portuguese way to prevent injuries.

The market place was packed with beautiful yarns. Of course I went to buy some Blacker yarns. I am most likely going to knit mittens with them. Then I got some fingering weights for the future baby garments.

I am going to try to crochet with Renaissance BFL, it seems to be quite tightly plied, so I think it would work well in crochet too.

Then there is this beautiful lace weight, most likely a baby blanket...

Many years ago when knitting started to pick up, new knitting yarns started to appear  and now we have an abundance of beautiful knitting yarns. While there is an issue with yarn splitting in knitting, I think it is worse in crochet. Now that crochet is picking up and more and more people are going to crochet (with wool too) I am wishing that there will be more yarns designed for crochet.

What would be a perfect wool yarn for crochet? Could it be singles? Or two-plies only? I have not been doing crochet long enough to know exactly what would work best, I would need to crochet a lot more to be able to tell, but I am truly waiting for some lovely fingering weights that would be firstly a crochet yarn... )

This yarn is totally new to me, stainless steel  and wool by Habu. I have not yet tried it but am looking forward to the experience. And finally, I have my first set of Signature dpns! With all these new things, I better start knitting... oh well, of course I have been knitting some, but not enough to show you anything interesting at this point. Next time...

Wool with you,
Lene

PS. This summer has been very good for my pot-roses... they all bloom and the scent is just heavenly!