London, V&A and Knit Nation

Late July, I took a trip down to London for Knit Nation, a fun show of classes on knitting and spinning plus a great marketplace. The event was held at Imperial college in London and I stayed in the student halls. The other big attraction for me in the area was the chance to go back to the Victoria and Albert museum. I think its my favourite museum. I took a ton of pictures which I've made into a slide show below.



Imperial College itself was a lovely venue for the Knit Nation event.



I loved the glass panels outside.



The market place opened on the Thursday evening with a preview night. Most of the early arrivals headed for the Wollmeise stall.





The stall was pretty crowded but mostly good natured. I'm not very tall and I got jostled a little in the crowd plus at one point, I bent down to look at yarn and before I got up again, skeins of wollmeise yarn started falling on my head. Ironically in the subsequent two marketplace days, you could walk right up to the stall for good parts of the day and browse in peace.

On the Friday I took a all day class with Cookie A on top down sock design, during which I completely forgot to take any pictures. The class was amazing and Cookie A is a very inspirational teacher. I have a sock in progress which I designed during the class that I'm knitting away at very slowly.

Another fun aspect of the weekend was the Ravelry pattern on the Saturday night which was a lot of fun. Jess and Casey from Ravelry were exactly how I pictured them and bought lovely project bags as a gift for the attendees.






The whole Knit Nation experience was really good. Alice and Cookie A and the volunteers all did an amazing job of organising the event and making it a lot of fun. As did all the stall holders who did well to keep functioning seeing how long the event was. It was sad when it was all over.

Hello again

Life has been a bit busy lately for a variety of reasons.

First up, the final total that I raised for Race for life was £250, which I was incredibly pleased with. The voucher for the OMA yarn was won by Anna from my knitting group and I'm busily knitting a pair of socks for the sock prize winner. Time has slightly run away from me lately but if you donated and I haven't been in touch yet, I will be as I would like to give a little something to everyone who did donate.

Work has been keeping me busy. I can't quite believe I've been in my new job for 9 months already and it all seems to be going well. They've been pretty understanding with hospital appointments as the thumb problem that I had earlier in the year has continued to cause difficulty and I've been attending physio sessions for the past two months. Again I have a delightful thumb splint to wear and will probably have to wear it on and off in the future as my physio has discovered that the injury was aggravated by the fact that I have hyper mobile thumb joints. Its not just the thumb joints but also my ankles. The ankle joint effect has caused me to fall 3 times in the past couple of months so I've been a bit bruised and battered.

Thankfully the thumb problem has not stopped me knitting although it has affected my ability to stitch at times. I have finished a couple of things, including a long term sock WIP.

Oh and there was also my annual stitching weekend with friends in there, a trip to London from Knit Nation, a visit to the Knit Camp market place and a Ravelry meet up picnic but more on them in the next few days.