Well, I did it. I bought a croft house by the sea and I wrote a book. I had an agent but she couldn’t get the book picked up by a publisher.
I have been releasing the book in chapters that align to the month that we are currently in. April’s will be released in Patreon on 1st April.
In April’s post, I share how the blizzards come across the island, how the Gibbous moon hangs over the roof of the croft house, how ships shelter and the bay and how I sieved soil to grow vegetables. There is always a letter to Susan Halcrow, the woman who lived in the house I bought from 1876 to 1960, at the end of each chapter.
Here is the beginning of April’s post …
It is the first day of April. At daybreak, the new day is gentle, unlike the last few weeks. At 5:30am, there is a noticeable absence of the winds. The big, fat three quarter moon is hanging low, towards the South of the village. It has drawn back the tides leaving metres of knee-deep seaweed stranded on the beaches. At this early hour, the moon is setting to the South West. Its large, clear presence greets me and for the first time in years, I reach for my old camera to watch the magnificence of the waning gibbous moon kissing the atmosphere above the croft houses in South Punds. Through the magnifying lens, I can clearly see a speckled crust with craters like chicken pox marks. Directly Infront of the open porch door, the calm light reveals a fishing boat within my sight line as if under the stillness of a glass bell jar…
If you join Patreon now, you also receive all the previous posts – 8 Shetland posts in total taking you through every month – I look forward to seeing you join me 🙂
In preparation for the workshop, I have been working with Kerry, from Rowan, regarding yarn colours to work with in in the workshop and to reknit the Sea Urchin hat pattern using Rowan Felted Tweed.
It didn’t take me long to finish the new hat and I was really pleased with how the colours worked together. Along the way, I had to adjust the pattern for an entirely different yarn to the one I originally used. I knitted a corrugated rib for this pattern to show off the texture.
RFT, is thicker yarn than I originally used – it’s composition is 50% Wool, 25% Alpaca, 25% Viscose and comes in 50g balls. It knits up as double knit, it’s soft and not scratchy. Jamieson’s Spindrift is 100% Shetland wool and knits up as 4ply and can be scratchy. As well as the feel and size, the two hats turn out very differently in shape. The Rowan Felted Tweed hat is, of course, bigger thant he original.
When I first knitted the Sea Urchin hat pattern ten years ago, I used vintage tapestry yarns and the hat was just a quick project for me. I knitted it in a number of different colour ways before going to Shetland for the first time in 2015, and finding Jamieson’s spindrift. I still have those first hats from 2014 – they’ve been part of my design process going back 10 years. The new hat, knitted in RFT is of similar design to my first ones. Below are images of the ones I made in Tapestry yarn.
The yarn used in any project dictates the size and shape of the finished hat. Over time, I’ve blocked each hat in to a shape that resembled a slouching hat or a kind of beret and latterly, with Jamieson’s yarn, it was a neat beanie.
Seeing the early photos of this hat, I see a different shape entirely to the one that they morphed into over time, taking on the shape of my head through being soaked in gale force rains, being stuffed in pockets and in bags and left for months in a drawer. When I was living in Brindister, West Burrafirth, Shetland, I wore the Tapestry yarn hat every day whilst walking around the voe on those winter days- especially in the piercing winds.
It was then that I was first inspired by the Sea urchin shells that I found in West Burrafirth, where I began to find many discarded Sea Urchin shells of various sizes and colours, left by seagulls. They were abandoned on banks and on flat, wet, mossy plateaus used as seagull breakfast tables. All had been smashed to get to their breakfast but I was on the lookout for a complete one. My very first complete found sea urchin shell was an exciting surprise, like finding a four-leafed clover when I was a kid. I turned it around and around looking at its pattern. I collected any shell that was whole, even if it was broken into until I couldn’t hold them in my hands – so I used my hat to carry the porcelain like sea urchin shells back to the croft house. When I scrutinized the patterns, I saw that both my hat and urchin shell had a similar shape – the hat with a 5-pointed section crown and an urchin-like roundness and in return, the sea urchin shell looked hat-like. When I returned home to Yorkshire at the end of 2019, I produced my first knitting pattern in January 2020, and called the it, Sea Urchin Shetland Hat pattern.
I am now loving using Rowan Felted Tweed yarn for this new pattern which is just called, Sea Urchin Hat.
My workshop is now live on the Rowan Connect Website. There’s lots of workshops on during the weekend of 12th – 14th April – Even Kaffe Fassett, is doing a talk. So, maybe I will see you online on at my session on 12th April – hope so. AND if you would like to win a place on all complimentary sessions and to my workshop at Rowan Connect on the weekend of 12th – 14th April, I will be picking one person out of a hat from the people who buy the new pattern. Closing date to buy the pattern is April 5th.
I’m really excited to be doing an online colour blending workshop for Rowan Connect because it will run completely differently to how I run my smaller workshops.
Online colour blending workshop for Rowan Connect in April is in link below
tracey doxey 