As you may have noticed, I have been paying rather a lot of attention these days to the design of things. The new website is the most visible of the design projects, but there are many others happening quietly behind the scenes. I suppose it began with the design of the Driving Miss Daisy gloves, and has continued since largely owing to the inordinate amount of time I have on my hands, now that my hands are free from knitting. (To say nothing of creative mojo that is rising like a spring tide, and has nowhere else to go but into pixels or onto paper.) Whatever the impetus, I’m enjoying it.

Part of the design process for the DMD gloves involved the creation of a new layout for the printed pattern. Driving Miss Daisy is not just a good pattern, it’s also a well thought out, and beautifully designed pattern, if I do say so myself. It’s clean and easy-to-read and, best of all, the design confines all the utterly necessary but toner-wasting color pictures to the first page of the pattern. Though this isn’t an issue with the Driving Miss Daisy kit, as the pattern is professionally printed, I was thinking about using the pattern layout for past and future work, even as I designed it. With this pattern layout you don’t have to waste a lot of expensive color toner to print out a knitting pattern; you can print out just the black and white facts, ma’am. I’m so happy with the concept that I have been reworking all my patterns and laying them out anew.

The first of my designs to get the makeover was the Hellfire Lace version of Brother Amos’s Socks, a pattern I designed several years ago, just for Cast On donors. Having, at the time, recently finished rereading Stella Gibbons’ excellent novel, Cold Comfort Farm, I named the socks “Brother Amos” after one of the characters in the book.

I must say, I’m very pleased with the redesigned sock pattern, which now makes use of recent advances in toe up sock technology. The hand dyed yarn originally specified is no longer available, so I chose new yarn for the project – Regia Hand Dye Effect. This particular colourway, “Rubin” pleases me to no end, both for it’s beauty, as well as its homonymic name. (One of the sons on Cold Comfort Farm is called Ruben because, as Stella Gibbons writes, “Highly sexed young men living on farms are always called Seth or Ruben.”)

After the big redesign, came the big reknit; a slow and painful process. This was the very last project I completed before deciding to take a break from knitting. Tonia helped with the big new photo shoot (which was in no way painful) after which I uploaded everything to Flickr and offered the pattern for sale on Ravelry as a pdf download. It was very big job that really deserved a special Ta-Da! moment at the end of it, but somehow I got distracted and forgot all about it. Until this week, when two people bought the pattern, and reminded me that it exists.

The newly pretty Brother Amos Hellfire Lace sock pattern is now available for purchase on Ravelry.

Ta Da!

Cat Bordi’s new sock book looks amazing.

Loads of nice ideas for draping, folding, and wearing great swathes of lace.

Louise Fairburn, an award-winning breeder of rare Lincoln Longwool sheep, used the fleece from her very own flock to create her gorgeous and unique wedding dress. The accompanying article states the dress was created by a spinner and a dressmaker, and took 67 hours to make.

A student at the Royal College of Art, Merel Karhoff, brings attention to the free energy source all around us in her final RCA show. Karhoffs installation makes wind energy visible by attaching paper windmills to unlikely surfaces – trees, architectural columns, and even the human body, via her pinwheel brooches.

The highlight of her show, a wind-powered knitting machine, churns out a tube of knitted fabric when the wind blows. Karhoof harvests and fashions products from the knitted fabric created by the antique sock knitting machine.

There’s a lovely video of the machine here.

Margaret Werthiem, science writer and co-founder of The Institute For Figuring, speaking at TED about her crochet coral reef project. Find sixteen minutes to watch this. It’s really worth it.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I love this song. Says it all, really.

So Emris and Gerry and Bernard and Rob were just standing around one day, and Emris looked at the bunch of LED lights Rob was holding, and Gerry looked at the sheep, and Bernard says, “Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

I love Wales. So much.

Thanks, Zabet!

Lots of debate over whether this was a real display of ordinary shepherding, or a mix of live action and computer wizardry. Here, the shepherds speak for themselves.

Chris Baldwin, creator of the comic strip Little Dee, riffed about knitting and spinning over the month of February. It’s a topic that comes up a lot in this comic, as this sea shanty from a strip in October 2007 illustrates. It’s fun and funny, and the punchline to this long song about knitting is pitch perfect.

From the clever people at Dutch design house, Denmakersvan, the Lace Fence. Strong enough for outdoors, beautiful enough for indoors, and quite possibly the loveliest fencing I’ve ever seen. It almost looks like knitting…

Thanks, Tonia!