Tell me …. What is it that puts you off using or experimenting with new colours in your stranded colour work project?
I’m currently in Fujiyoshida – a town at the base of Mount Fuji, for 28 days. I’ve been knitting my Tree and Star sleeves with an idea to add them to a fabric body. I bought a couple of Kimono from the flea market at Hanazono Shrine in Tokyo but the fabric doesn’t work for a body with these sleeves. So, I may knit another Kaleidoscope jumper body using 3mm needles so that all the people who wanted a larger size can see how a needle increase from 2:75mm to 3mm will make to the overall size. Would that be of interest to anyone who was hoping for the next size up?
I am using my stash yarn as evidence of a journey in colour. A journey that anyone could do with their own stash. I kept knitting this motif in different colours because I couldn’t settle on just one. Each version felt like a different mood—quiet, bold, playful, grounded. The first colours of brightest pinks with my initials and the year 2026, when the project will be finished, felt like really owning the sleeve as – not just knitting but creative freedom.
That’s when I realized the pattern isn’t about my colour choices at all. It’s about giving you a place to try yours. I would like to invite you to have a look at these sleeves and think of the colours and if you were going to knit the same jumper – which ones might you give a try.
When I lived in Shetland, my knitting patterns and their colour choices were devised around the wild Shetland landscape, the croft house that I lived in and the woman who had lived in the house for 83 years until 1960. But now, the Kaleidoscope jumper has been more playful, named after my own kaleidoscope at home, which has a great big blue marble at the end.
Kaleidoscope
Would you like to try this jumper pattern for your everyday self—or your future self? I am wearing this jumper daily in Japan – it matches the sky and I am having a lot of fun wearing it with the matching hat and a tweed jacket. On Sunday, we all (from the residency) did a drop-in session for anyone who would like to knit or weave or trying punch needling. So many people came to see us including some Tokyo Fashion guys who wore all black, all brown or all Navy and I suggested that they needed a little colour – like a Fair Isle vest just showing through their dark colours -for every day. They were very interested in the colour idea.
The motif repeats consistently and the colours can be swapped without recalculating the whole pattern. I designed this so colour changes feel playful, not precious.
The pattern doesn’t ask you to commit to one look—it gives you a place to experiment. To trust your instincts. To surprise yourself.
If you want a project where colour gets to be personal, this one might be for you.
Swatch your colour ideas first – always swatch for colour to see what works and what doesn’t – for you. Keep the motif and the background colours with enough contrast so that the pattern is not muddied. And just experiment – this is the perfect motif.
Experimenting with colours that you love.
Here is the Kaleidoscope Jumper Let me know in the comments if you have bought the pattern and are still considering the colours you might choose.
Here are the Tree and Star sleeves which are alternative sleeves to the Tree only sleeves in the original pattern.
Let me know what you think about your colour choices.
I’m sitting on the roof of our residency, watching sunrise over Fuji, and I finally figured out that it’s Saturday. Being on an artist residency for a month, in another place, city, country, is kind of not knowing what day it is. To be fully immersed in place and a practice of making whatever comes to mind, and experiencing and finding new things in a new city that you never knew existed removes dates on a calendar and even day names.
I think it’s day 12. I finally settled into this place with new people and new building. On a practical level I’m still knitting. I’ve been knitting my second sleeve using the colours that I brought with me and really enjoying how they both sleeves sit alongside each other.
We’ve all had an artist interview with the people who manage the residency here. The questions were quite interesting – Tell us about you, what can you bring to Fujiyoshida, what does the residency space mean for you and a couple more questions that I’ve forgotten. I think what I bring here is an enduring curiosity for a place and culture (not everyone sees that in me) and an ability to share my findings with many people on my website blog and on Instagram. Of course I share just my perspective but I have a pretty keen eye.
Yesterday I was picked up by a complete stranger that contacted me through Instagram. She is called Shannon. She and her sister Pat were visiting their brother Mike who lives quite close to Fujiyoshida. We went to the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum, which is a museum built in 1994 by Itchiku Kubota to house his permanent exhibition of his work. It was quite remarkable to see the Kimono in all of their glory showing his techniques. If you ever go, my favourites were numbers 19 and 20. The gardens and buildings also represent the world of Itchiku
Then we went to the very beautiful chair museum to the foot of Mt. Fuji, in the forest of Oishi in Fujikawaguchiko. My favourite thing was the initial scent of wood on entering the building and the glorious, viewing Veranda where from many strategically placed small glass Windows in the traditional paper Shoji sliding doors you could view Mount Fuji whilst sitting on extremely exquisite low wooden sofas and chairs.
viewing gallery shoji screen view
The view is exquisite. The scent was heavenly and then I found out that the building had been completely dismantled from the Saitama Prefecture in Tokyo, piece by piece and brought her to the mountain side.
If you don’t take chances with new people you never encounter these new things, so thank you Shannon for getting in touch and thank you Mike for driving us everywhere yesterday.
On a basic level, I’m knitting and my knitting is always portable so I sit on the roof at sunrise and watch the sun drench Fuji with colours of red or white light. I take my knitting to cafés and down to the Onsen, Which I visit every day except Wednesdays when it’s closed.
Knitting brought me here. Knitting has taken me to Shetland and other far off places and enabled me to continue to learn and express my creative practice through storytelling.
Here are my sleeves.
I am still not sure whether I will add them to a fabric body or a knitted body but if you want to practice your own colour work and experimentation through pattern and colour – then have to go with these sleeves or the hat pattern because this easy to knit motif lends itself to real experimentation and colour work.
Oh yes, I remember that one of the questions in the artist interview was, ‘what does art mean to you?’ and I think it is entirely about creative expression and freed of thought and when they both come together – you get alchemy
If you’d like to try this motif in a hat or jumper or alternative sleeves, then the links are here.
AN EXTRACT FROM MY, ‘DEAR SUSAN,’ memoir from when I lived in Shetland
Shetland, Arrival August 2020
Dear Susan,
I begin with the outside, with what I have to hand; my reason, my eyes, my spatial understanding, and an openness tinged with the unknown.
On arriving, I need my first investigations of your croft house interior to be made alone. I want to inhale the house, listen to my internal feelings at first sight then recognise how my body responds to the old stones – I need to let body and stones talk to me. Thoughts and feelings need space. I need space. I haven’t yet found you. I do not know that you were born in this house 145 years ago.
It is a pale grey day, mist rolling over the hill behind the house as if a blind has been half pulled down a window. The sky is bleached out, the day is calm and windless, not particularly notable.
I open the front porch door, then, I try the house door with its mismatched glass panels. It opens. To the right in the tiny vestibule area, there is a third old, board-door, painted white with a hand-hewn square wooden knob which I turn to the right. The simple mechanism lifts a wooden latch inside. That sharp click sound of the latch lifting and hitting its wooden casing is the sound that I will forever remember of this place. It is my first sound here and it will probably be my last when I leave. It is a click of old wood against old wood, heard by every man, woman and child that has ever entered this house before me, for the last 180 years. Human touch leaves tangible traces of every hand that has opened it before me. The patina of years lies dirty on the paint’s surface.
Simultaneously, within the sound, my heart is given over to the first sight of the flag floor and fire place in the sitting room. In an instant, I am sold on sound and sight. I know I will not pull out of this crazy unseen deal to buy a house and change my life entirely.
Heart over head, I move in three weeks later, with two cats and a bag, the furniture and belongings on a lorry, to arrive a week later.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Anais Nin
Dear Susan,
I am finding you.
I have been sent an image of your Brother – John Halcrow, in his Naval Uniform. I begin to look at censuses and the local history ancestry website then I ask around to find out about the previous inhabitants of this house. I called in at John’s to ask about you because I know nothing of the woman I had heard lived in the house for many years. He said to speak to Jim, so I went over the road to Jim’s and Martin was there too. They were off to Anne Mouat’s funeral but Jim was gracious with his time with me. He told me of you – Susanna (Susan, Cissie) who lived in the house that I now live in and that he was sent as a child, nearly 80 years ago, to collect the milk from you at your house. He told me that you had one cow on the croft, you sold milk, and you rowed the little hand-written paper milk bills up on a shelf in the porch – the same porch that I have. He was a young boy then but he clearly remembers you.
At the funeral, Martin spoke with Raymond whose Aunt lived in the house after you. You knew her, her name was Alice. Raymond came to see me the next day with a mesmerising handful of photographs of you. He introduced me to Susanna Halcrow (Susan, Cissie, or even Zizzie) The photographs, he told me, had been left in the house after his Aunt Alice had died some 30 years after you.
For the first time I could put a face to the name of a woman who lived in my old house for 83 years. Your face, your name. I sank to sit on the floor to look at your serene face in the images dating back to early 1900. Your candid expression caught by the lens of a camera, looking openly right back at me opened something inside me to find you more deeply.
You were born in this house on the 6th February 1876 and Died on 4th January 1960.
In the archives at the museum, I found that your Halcrow family had lived here through the 1800’s – 1960. They were listed in the 1888 valuation roll of the Symbister Estate, Whalsay, partly owned by the Laird, William Arthur Bruce (In 1888, John Halcrow, your Father) tenant, paid a yearly rent of £4, 10 Shillings for croft number 7. You would have been twelve years old (registered as knitter). The whole family are on the census of 1881 and ‘Susanna’ is listed as being five years old – there were seven people living in this small house at that time – Thomas Halcrow aged 86, Barbara Halcrow aged 83 (your grandparents), John Halcrow aged 40 and Ann Halcrow aged 41 (your parents) John aged nine, you aged five and a boy named John Brown aged 13, but you will already know this. Seven people living in this small two bedroomed house. Afterwards, I looked at records from 1838 and found your family, here, in Upperton.
In the grave yard at Levenwick cemetery, you lie on your own next to your parents and brothers. Your head is against the sea and in May, you rest above a bank carpeted in pale lemon primroses. I wonder if you are lonely, or if you are free.
Over the months after arriving, I became obsessed with you and wrote thoughts that occurred to me about you, on scraps of paper. These papers began to litter the house. I connected with you through a field of built environment in the house, photographs, your old pottery, the view from the sitting room window and eight sessions in the Shetland Museum archive which revealed the legal documents relating to some of the most notable social changes in Shetland between the 1880’s and mid 1950’s. The *Register of the Sasines, recorded the sale of the house from Laird to local in 1923, valuation rolls of rent paid for three generations of the Halcrow family for over 100 years are traceable, the Napier Commission registered the croft and detailed their calculated rental value and reduction of rents for Shetland crofters and the legal rights for tenants, the Small Holding Act, and I found the registered wills of your brother and finally your own, which gave me an insight into over one hundred years of three generations of Halcrow life within this old house. To the very end, with your serene looking gaze of steady calm and with a glint in your eyes, you put everything in order to the very last moment – crossing every t and dotting ever i. All of your wishes are written clearly in the directions of your will.
But, how am I to find out about you – what you thought and felt and how you lived? The neighbours reveal little.
So, I turn to the physical things to look at our lives carried out in the same place – the same stone walls of a house built so long ago – with no record of its beginning, how the breeze moves through the house through its open doors, the sound of the wooden doors and their opening and closing then there is the view – a view that has changed every single day of every single year but it is the same frame from which you looked and I now look out of at the changing world.
Your artifacts have been returned to the house – some pitchers, jugs, vases, plates, bowls. Before mixing them on the shelves with my own plates and jugs, I turn them around and around to connect with a life before and then there is the biggest connection of all – that you were and I am single women, living a life and paying the bills on our own in an old stone house facing the sea. Did you talk to Ralph, the dog, as I talk with Tiggy and Alfie?
I wonder about the touch upon things, the patina laid down by years of paint, of opening and closing the door, of turning door knobs, of opening and closing windows.
Finding you is like the moment I removed a damp layer of wallpaper in one gentle pull upwards, in an old abandoned derelict Shetland croft house, to reveal a perfect hand printed layer of pre 1950’s paper with wildflowers printed up it. Then, in one more pull that strip of hand printed wallpaper also came off the wall completely intact. I folded the paper and placed it under my jumper, its dampness pressed against the skin of my belly. I thought that if I were to paste the top layer of wall paper back over the void, then no one would know what had been before. No one would know what had been removed from underneath the top layer. It was as if it had never existed.
Finding you IS like finding old beautiful handprinted wallpaper lying beneath layers of less attractive paper. Then peeling it off in sections and placing it under my jumper for safety. Susan, you are under my jumper, next to my skin.
I lift the pewter lid of your old Victorian salt ware jug to look inside. Revealing, peeling, pasting, painting, lifting, closing, opening things in the house, as generations have done so before me. I paint over what has been on the walls and doors. I sit quietly to look at the layers of layers, like the quiet man who mediates first thing in the morning, stripping away layers of noise to his core, before all else happens in the day.
I spoke to Marylyn, who, as a 10-year-old child, moved in to this house with her family. It was the year you died. She told me of a wash stand in each bedroom and jugs and bowls, a sink at the bottom of the stairs and a radio on a dresser in the front room. These were your things left behind. I can picture them now. She told me that her and her brother slid down the green linoleum on the stairs and they telephoned their cousins in the house behind by joining two cans with a long piece of string and shouting out the back window in the north bedroom. I can hear their laughter now. Children in the house for the first time in over 60 years.
But, I wonder, who cares for our loved things?
The above words are from the beginning of my memoir which was never published. I did have an agent but she couldn’t get a publisher interested
While I lived in Shetland, I designed many hats and then branched out to my first jumper – The Dear Susan, which was supported by a VACMA award – Visual Arts, Creative Makers from Creative Scotland. The award bought me time to create and the Dear Susan jumper came out of that creation.
The Dear Susan Jumper, was released in July 2021 and had a 13 page story included about the woman that the jumper was named after
Susan Halcrow would have been one exemplary woman – crofter, single, attractive. She was alive through so many huge social changes in Shetland and she knew her rights. She lived in the houses I bought for 83 years.
After I designed the Dear Susan jumper in 2ply and in many sizes – I knitted a very quick, easy Aran, Dear Susan. which was finally published in December 2021. It was designed with love and enriched with the winds and rains of Shetland.
Looking back, I am proud of these two designs and the story behind them.
If you would like to knit either of these jumpers, you do get a 13 page story about my life in Shetland, with it.
This morning, I posted on Instagram, a question to myself and anyone else who wanted to answer.
Here is the post
Dear Friends, For so much of my life, my purpose was clear: raising children, working hard – even from the time I was working in a chip shop at the age of twelve, paying every bill, standing on my own two feet. My days were filled with responsibility, with caring for others, with the thought of always moving forward.
Now, at sixty-two, I find myself asking a new question: can my purpose be me? I was talking to a friend yesterday about giving up work. He said but I need purpose. My work is not my purpose. So, now I wonder Can purpose be found in quiet moments, like the way the rising sun casts a shadow across my wall? And I sit and truly enjoy that moment, Can it be in the joy of growing plants, in sewing, in designing knitting patterns, in feeding my many wild animal friends, and listening to tig’s happy purring, and in simply being here—present in the now?
I think the answer is yes. Maybe purpose doesn’t always have to be about doing more, giving more, proving more. Maybe it can be about inhabiting the life we’ve built, noticing the beauty around us, and letting ourselves rest in who we are today. I am accepting my new purpose in this new phase of my life. What do you think?
Additionally, thank you to everyone who sponsored me for the 30 day walking for a 3 mile walk every day for Cancer Research Uk. We did good for the research and I walked every day and continue to do so.
and, if you would like to support me in this new season of my life, then, please buy a knitting pattern, then you, Ravelry, paypal and I will all get a little something. xxxx
I am off to Japan again this year and beginning to allow myself to be excited. There is still so much to sort but I will write from the place I am staying. I may even do a Christmas online workshop.
A beautiful Autumn morning – the sky was deep pink ahead of the sun rising. It is not cold but a nip touches my cheeks.
I am experimenting outside where the crows are crawing, with Japanese Kimono silk that I bought from the flea market in Kyoto on Christmas day 2023.
The kimono is of brown silk with plumb blossom flowers, lined in scarlet silk with cranes and chrysanthemum in the weave.
It is 7:45am. A man, over the road, is sweeping leaves from around his house with a yard brush. The sound of brushing takes me back to when I lived in China and all I could hear every early morning, was the sound of sturdy bristles sweeping – sweeping rubbish, or dust, or leaves or anything before the honking sound of horns started. Brushing in the hutongs, is a sound that is so deep inside me that I had forgotten it. But here it is, resurrected over the road – not a leaf blower to be heard.
This morning, I am working on my piece called ‘ Between Paper and Silk, and I have again become excited about the kimono fabrics that I bought in Kyoto. It is a pure joy to look at the patterns in the fabric, like water marks of cranes in scarlet.
But, when I apply the glue and water to the scarlet fabric, I think it will wash away the cranes but they are still visible so the fabric is woven. I am learning the materials and how they react to water and shifting light. When I was in Kyoto, Maki San, said that you cannot wash the old kimonos which is why people don’t really want them. I now see 2 reasons why you wouldn’t was a kimono. 1. The colours do run. They are not moder dyes that are set and 2. The pattern that you see dancing in the fabric may be water marks and not weave. Having said all that, the scarlet silk is holding its cranes and chrysanthemums inside.
Here is my progress. Paper Rice bowl. And Cyanotype flower tea pot.
I’m bringing together all of the tools of my crafts
Alfie was a quiet cat, who did everything on his own terms.
I adopted him from the RSPCA in Sheffield on 16th December 2012. He chose me. When I visited the RSPCA, I applied for a cat but I didn’t know what kind of cat. When I walked round, I saw all the little animals in different stages of loss and worry. Alfie was standing on his hind legs, scratching at the glass to get out. I loved his spirit, his little fight. Every time I passed his cage, he scratched at the glass – so that was it, he chose me and he was already called Alfie and he was about 4 years old but there was no other information except he had been mistreated.
In the spring of 2013, a feral, handsome, tabby started to come into the house and steal any food left behind. He was terrified of me and ran across and through anything to get away from any human or any sound. When I was out, he would also fight with poor Alfie, who was a much smaller cat. Finally, the tabby let me ghost stroke him when he was gulping food – in other words, I couldn’t touch him but I could stroke the air above him so that he might realise that I would not hurt him. Until, one day, I caught him in the cat basket and took him to the vets to be castrated so that he would stop peeing all over the house. After that, Tiggy loved me and tolerated Alfie and Alfie was carful around Tiggy but that was it, we were a small family and we shuffled along. Tiggy was top cat and he was needy for my love and ate first and Alfie, was Alfie, he went about his day, choosing where to sleep and he ate as much as he could.
Four years later, I moved from that lovely little house on a steep hill, to a small ground floor flat in Sheffield so that I might be mortgage free and I could pay for myself to do an MA in Knitting at NTU. The flat opened onto a large manicured green garden and both cats settled. Tiggy ate as many mice as he could and Alfie slept on the soft grass. During my MA, I fell in love with Shetland until finally, in 2020, I moved, lock, stock and two cats a thousand miles from the city to live in a croft house that faced the sea in Levenwick. I transported the cats in a double cat pram which they fought hard and cried and whined the whole 12 hours up the country to Aberdeen to be released in our pet friendly cabin for the 14 hour journey to Lerwick. On the ferry, they settled in my cabin, at Orkney, we were all woken by the great clanking of chains as the ferry docked in Kirkwall – both cats frightened by new sounds and when we docked in Lerwick, they had become little celebrities in their pram.
We lived in a beautiful, untouched, 200-year-old croft house that faced the sea. Tiggy loved the stone walls surrounding the place – them being full of tiny creatures to catch. He wasn’t afraid of the winds or rains. Alfie loved the fireside; he warmed his face and didn’t leave his little spot. He was scared of the stormy weather and when he ran out to the toilet, he hid under the bushes in the abandoned walled garden opposite to the house. Who was I kidding? I was also scared of the storms. The harsh winds made Alfie squint and flatten his ears to his head, something I didn’t know that he could do, he sat out on the wall – looking out to sea, he followed me to the byre behind the house and watched me dig soil, he sat in the deep window sills looking out at the skies and waited for me to return home his vantage point in the bedroom window, sometimes he would follow me to the end of the lane and nose up to the neighbour’s horses and he still loved his food. By then, he had learned to purr and he was always there, just there for me.
In October 2021, I returned to the city. A single Island life alone was too much for me, too isolated and too much alone in every way and I was a strong independent woman. When we returned, I had no home or job and I continued to drag the cats around, I couldn’t find rented accommodation because of them and no one would take us in for short stay either. I had them fostered out for a week or a little more 3 times and twice, I nearly had to give them up – the Rspca’s law is that they will take back any animal that came from there so they would take Alfie but not Tiggy. I cried and dragged them from pillar to post until a friend took me and the boys in and finally, ironically, I bought a flat in the same place as the one that I sold to go to live in Shetland. But the new flat I bought was a wreck and broken and ugly. We made do. We had a home and the boys went straight out into an area they already knew.
We have been here for three years. Alfie watched the birds, sat with the badgers without fear, sent dogs running from his path on the pavement when he stood his ground, He only had two teeth but he was NO pushover and he still loved his food but over the last year, he had been renamed Alfie thin thin because he was getting thinner and thinner. In January, his breathing had bouts of what seemed like he couldn’t stop a rattling noise and I took him to the vet. They said, that he would be a different boy in a month. I took him home, he rolled in the sunshine, waited by the window at 3:30pm every day for me to return from work, and he met me in the car park when he heard me parking the car. He still ate everything and wanted more and sat beside me purring more and more.
I didn’t realise how much of our lives were together and how much we quietly meant to each other.
On Saturday 15th March, he woke at 6am and sat beside my face on the pillow, looking at me and purring. I told him how much I loved him and how grateful I had been for his friendship. On that day, he stopped eating, drinking and moving – except to find his comfort somewhere. He sat on my knee for 2 hours and I knew that he was dying. We went to bed and he crawled under the bed into the back corner – something he has never done before. I placed him a cat litter tray under the bed and wondered if he would be there in the morning. When I woke in the night, he was sleeping at the end of the bed. At 5am, he walked up the bed and got into the window sill above my head behind the bed. He lay and spread himself in a long thin line, in the coolness of the window sill, his chin resting on his right paw, his face turned towards me in the bedroom. His breathing was gentle and silent. I put the pillows up the wall and sat beside him, telling him how loved he was, how special he had been and how he had been the best friend ever and I thanked him again.
The pigeons cooed outside, the dawn chorus started at 5:30am for an hour and still he lay there with me silently crying beside him. I didn’t want him to know I was sad, so I kept gently stroking him from his nose to his top of his head and he just looked and listened. I told him that he was, ok. Below the pale sunrise of Sunday 16th March, and a dawn chorus to wake anyone, Alfie began to slip away in a place of calm serenity, a place he knew and felt safe. His once yellow eyes were all darkening. I opened the window a tiny crack and he wanted to get out, so, at 7:20, I gently lifted him up to take him outside where, he rose, dropped, arched his back and stretched out long and took his last breath. I sobbed a river holding him.
It is the first time that I have ever sat beside the approach and final act of death. I sobbed tears I didn’t even know were in me. I recognised that his soul had left him and he became heavier. I placed him in his favourite cardboard box where he stayed.
It has been interesting to note his absence this week – he isn’t looking out of the window, or waiting to meet me, his nails aren’t hitting the wooden floor as he walks and he doesn’t peer into my face first thing in the morning. I have greatly missed him, but today, Thursday, is the first day that I have felt a little energy again. The sun brought a new gentle energy and oh, how Alfie loved the sunshine. xx
tracey doxey 