The last flashback post was about a skirt that I knitted for Emma a good ten years ago.  Let’s continue with that theme by looking at another skirt, also for Emma.

This was featured in the post “How to end your knitting year with a bang!“, published in January 2016.  I had a lot of fun knitting this skirt, which incorporates a breezy, flirty ruffle, an even flirtier corseting feature which ties up through the back with a ribbon, and great shaping details.  In this post, I talked about making this with a more affordable yarn, and also how I got a bit of lift into the ruffle.  Looking at this post now, I am surprised at how green everything looked in the middle of January!  I’m not surprised at how good the skirt looks, as it’s a great pattern and Emma is a great model.

I hope that you are all well and managing to keep it together.  Stay safe!

I have to giggle at this cartoon from First Dog on the Moon, entitled “Stuck at home I am starting to miss the things that used to annoy the hell out of me”, which appeared a few weeks ago in The Guardian.  Here is one of the frames; go check out the rest!  (I love First Dog on the Moon!)

Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon, published in The Guardian, April 1, 2020

This made me think of a post I wrote in May of 2016 called “Annoying things“.  I published it on the second day of May (so almost exactly four years ago today) and I was very annoyed because it was cold out and my boiler was broken, and I decided to write a post about things that I find annoying. So, I present it to you here (follow the link) in a Lockdown Flashback, so we can look back with a sense of humour (hopefully) on how naive we seem in retrospect.

In light of events of the past few months, as first dog says, I would be happy to be annoyed by many of these things again, if it meant this was over.  Except maybe mystery KALs – I still want to know what I’m knitting.

I was speaking with Emma about how I was feeling under pressure to write a post, while at the same time distracted by a crazy amount of work.  And she said “You need to use ‘Teeny, tiny hat’ as a Lockdown Flashback!”  Maybe that is because the post starts with this diagramme:

Ha ha! It turns out that not only am I relating right now to that, but I am also really feeling the “head thunk” part of the post.  Thank you, Emma, I’ll play along: This Lockdown Flashback takes us back to Teeny, tiny hat, written in February of 2016.  The post shows what happens when you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing.  In this case: a VERY small hat.

In case you are wondering, I re-knitted the hat and it came out beautifully.  You can see it here.

Keep well everyone!

I have been doing some experimenting with colours, knitting swatches of the same pattern in different combinations of colours (more on this in my next post).  Thinking about how colours play against each other, and how different a colour can look depending on whether it is background or foreground, reminded me of this old post, Double feature, from April 2014.

In it I shared some photos which juxtaposed two very special colourwork projects which I had knitted, each using stranded knitting but in strikingly different graphic styles.  I used the same yarn for both projects – yellow on purple for the Tolkien-inspired pillow and purple on yellow for the comic book inspired mitts.  Links to both projects can be found in the linked post.

This photo makes me smile.  I think I could use a little “Bam!” and some “Pow!” as well right about now.

Today I will flash back to a post entitled Why I knit, from August of 2014.  This post shows off a gorgeous cardigan which I made for my daughter Leah.  It turned out to be a lovely combination of pattern and yarn and personality, resulting in the perfect sweater for Leah.

When I look back at all of the garments I’ve knitted in the past decade or two (or three or four) this one stands out as one of those that just clicked.  Everything about it made me happy.   I hope that reading the post makes you happy too.

Living in lockdown is strange.  Thinking about the future is scary.  I hope that you are finding some solace in knitting, or in other creative pursuits.  Take care of yourself!

For this Lockdown Flashback, let’s travel back to a post I wrote in April of 2013.  This post shows a lovely pullover I knit for myself – the design is called Livvy and the yarn is Lush Worsted, thus the post was titled Lush Livvy.  (I promise it’s not lascivious.)  I particularly like this project because I made quite a few modifications to the pattern to make it a much more suitable sweater for me – both in terms of fit and style.

In the post, I talk about how I identified the features I liked about the pattern, and also those that wouldn’t work on me, and the mods I made to make just the perfect sweater for me.  If you ever wish that you could modify a pattern and worry about whether you are up to the task, this is a good post for you.

It’s hard to believe that I wrote the post seven years ago this week.  Things were different back then, but thankfully many things are still the same.  For one thing, I am still knitting.  And still writing this blog.

It looks as if our lockdown here in the UK will be extended for another three weeks.  Doug and I started isolating on the 11th of March – we are both able to work remotely during this crisis – so its been more than 5 weeks now.  We are still talking to each other, which I guess is a good sign.

Keep well, everyone!

I started this blog in October of 2011.  That’s a long time to be blogging, and an awful lot of posts.  For today’s Lockdown Flashback, I take you back to the last day of 2011 when I wrote the post Capping off the Year.  This post shows off the just-finished Peerie Flooers hat by Kate Davies, my first foray into knitting fair isle.  I love this photo of all of the threads waiting to be woven in:

Please note that I am now a better fair isle knitter and the reverse side of my recent fair isle hats look way neater than this.  🙂  That is one of the things that I like about having this blog – it is a record, and I can see how I’ve grown and learned new things.  I look back at these early posts with some fondness.  I was still trying to figure out this blogging thing (with a lot of help from Emma) and having a lot of fun.

If you are interested in the pullover I am wearing in the post, I wrote a nice Wearability Wednesday post about it in October of 2012 called Fuzzy and Blue.

Keep well, my friends!