It was also the Swanage Blues Festival that weekend which we also attended with some friends on Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. I managed to get some more sock knitting done while listening to various groups.
I was booked to teach quite a few workshops in March as well as the usual City and Guilds class and then the first weekend in April was the Nottingham machine knitting show. After a slow start we had quite a reasonable day at the show although there weren't as many stall holders as in previous years. Before I left Alan Hunt asked me to see if we can encourage some hand knitting yarn suppliers to attend the show next year so I will be looking into this possibility in the next few months.
In the last 2 weeks I have done talks to 2 Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Guilds. Last week I went to the East Sussex Guild to do a talk on knitting with handspun and this weekend I went to the Sommerset Guild to talk on knitting with beads. Both talks seemed to go down well.
In between the talks and teaching I finished another design for 'Knitting' magazine which is schedules to be published in the July issue. The May issue of the magazine arrived last week and has my article on blocking and pressing knitwear. The June issue should have my article on sewing up knitwear using mattress stitch.
All this hasn't left much time for any other knitting but I have done some more work on my top down jumper. Although I was using 2 balls of yarn and knitting alternate rows with each ball the yarn has continued to pool. After knitting quite a bit down from the armhole I did try the jumper on and decided that the pooling looked OK once the jumper was on even though it doesn't look that great laid out flat.
Since taking these 2 photos I have actually finished the body section. I've added a moss stitch border to the bottom of the jumper as I don't want it to pull in. I'm hoping to get back to finish this garment fairly soon, after I have finished another garment for the magazine, a bias knitting waistcoat in Mille Colori Lang yarn and a jacket in the Lang yarn that Kareen at the InterKnit Cafe has asked me to design!
