Here is what I love about British needlework magazines: they give you stuff!
See? L to R that’s Simply Knitting with a sheep’s head row counter; Cross Stitching with a cute little mouse card kit with a puch-out to insert an embroidered face; and Cross Stitch Card Shop with a card kit featuring a little girl.
I am always scouring bookshops for the latest British magazines. Besides the fun of getting a little kit or a tool ready-to-go, they have a charming smallness of scale that comes from being based in a not-ginormous-like-the-U.S. country. In the past few years, U.S. quilt magazines have started doing “shop hop” issues, which feature stores from around the country. These can be interesting, but, let’s face it—I’m in California and am highly unlikely to ever to hop to most of these shops, which are scattered from Washington to Florida to Maine. But I can imagine a British needleworker reading a British magazine and deciding, “I should visit that shop” and actually going. I know, I know—it’s not as if every place is Britain is an hour or so from every other place in Britain. But compared to a California-to-Kentucky trek (yes, I would love to someday visit the quilting Mecca that is Paducah), travel within Britain just seems a lot more manageable.
(BTW, see the blue cover sweater on Simply Knitting? I’m thinking it might be just the thing for the two bags of cotton-rayon yarn in a tangerine-lime colorway that I had to buy from I-forget-where because it was only $15 a bag.)
Since I finished teaching my Shakespeare class on Thursday, I spent a good bit of yesterday getting back to more substantial knitting projects. I finished up a piece I’ve been working on for a while now as a gift (pic to come once the gift has been given). Then, I got back to work on the Origami Cardi. I still haven’t found any pictures of individual versions of this project on the web, but Knitting Daily did post a piece about it that includes a side-view photo, which clarifies the construction. This post confirms what I suspected, which is that this sweater knits up loosely, so I’m glad I didn’t go for the largest size for my version.