ghost of knitting past

Hello, and welcome. I'm Ms Bias, recalcitrant PhD student and narcissist. I've been sewing since I was about ten, when my mother and I made a rather lumpy skirt. There was also an ill-advised bikini top that my best friend and I started (but never finished) when we were eleven; a GCSE Textiles project that I never claimed and which is presumably still languishing somewhere in a cupboard in a comprehensive school in Nottinghamshire; and a pair of hand-sewn trousers and a skirt during a particularly time-rich and cash-poor summer in Saxony. In Autumn 1999 I suddenly got proper obsessed, and my collection of fabulous garments, shameful failures, Burda Mode magazines and gorgeous fabrics that I am definitely going to use one day has got bigger and bigger ever since.

My sewing machine has something like 3000km on it, having gone from York to Berlin to Dublin. Did you know you can post sewing machines? In search of a slightly more portable obsession, I picked up a pair of knitting needles, and, after a few false starts, started producing practically wearable garments:







Madey-uppy cardigan and halterneck, half a cotton/linen slubby blend than I picked up at a Berlin flea market, €8 for 300g, and half ggh Scarlet, 100% mercerized cotton.



Unhelpfully for any readers, the vast majority of things I sew or knit are made up. The one time I tried to make someone precisely according to the directions, in the exact same yarn, it came out completely different anyway:




Ribbed Swing Jacket from Debbie Bliss's Tweed Collection, made with approximately 350g of Aran Tweed



My swatching kept coming out enormous, you see, so I eventually knitted it on 3.5mm and 4mm needles instead of 4.5mm and 5mm, and it came out somewhat abbreviated - though I have no idea how abbreviated as Debbie Bliss doesn't believe in schematics. So I ripped the rolled-up sleeves from the bottom to a more happenin' length, and it is wonderfully swingy and warm and vastly more on-trend than it was supposed to be, and I love it to bits.

tomorrow: future plans!