Marina Skua Podcast Ep 35 – Stranded yoke knitting, willow basket weaving, plying yarn in the garden

yarn dyer based in Bath in the southwest of England and this podcast is mostly about the crafts that I do. Generally yarn crafts, so a lot of knitting, very occasional spinning and weaving and also some seasonal making. I like to work with local fibres as much as possible and generally have a bit of a focus on sort of traceability and sustainability in my work. So yeah, in summertime things tend to slow down a little bit around here. It's really nice and warm at the moment, I know that England turns not to be particularly well equipped for hot weather but it's when I'm happiest. It does mean that I'm taking things a little bit slowly, it seems to take me much, much longer to get anything done at the moment. So I've got some projects that I'm going to be showing you and then towards the end of the episode I'm just going to be sharing a little bit of plying some yarn that I'm spinning out in the garden. So first up I'm going to thank everyone who was part of the really, really warm reception to the Galdor cardigan which is a pattern I released last month. It's this one here with a nice bit of colour work on the cuffs and sleeves and around the neck band. It was just really, really nice to see that everyone has enjoyed it so much. It's lovely to see people beginning to cast on their projects and see how those are progressing. Anyone who has the pattern and has yet to get started, Emma of Woolly Mammoth Fibres who provided the yarn for my sample, she's going to be making her own version in some Svartblis and I think Dorset yarn. And so anyone who wants to knit one as well, there's going to be a very informal knit along on Instagram just using the hashtag Galdor Cardigan K-A-L and that will be running until the autumn and then at some point then there will be some prizes for people who have participated. And it's just, yeah, really, really nice that people are enjoying it and I hope that with people making them the weather will be slightly more appropriate for wearing warm woolens. Yeah, before I show you the knitting project that I've been working on fairly solidly over the last few weeks, I just want to mention the top I'm wearing. This is the Oak Moss Tee which was my very first garment design. I released it a couple of years ago and it's a fairly simple one. It's got these little cap sleeves. It's quite good for covering up your shoulders because I, well, I tend to find that I get very, very tan just on these bits here from when I wear sleeveless tops and I wanted to make quite roomy sleeves just to help things stay cool in the summer. The yarn I used is one by Wooly Knit. It's a linen cotton blend from European Linen and Cotton. It's a very affordable yarn and, yeah, it's quite nice to knit with. I find that linen can be quite gappy to knit with so often you end up needing another layer underneath which, for me, sort of defeats the point of summer knitting. I want to wear as few layers as possible. But this, having the cotton blended in with it, means that the fabric falls out slightly and that means that it creates quite a nice fabric and it comes in some fairly nice gentle colours. So I'll put a link to the pattern in the description box below if anyone's interested in that one. So, yes, the project I've been working on over the last few weeks is the only thing I've been doing any knitting on and it's a design that I came up with back in January, I think, when I was spending just a lot of time sketching various colourwork designs and I did a little bit of swatching and then other things got in the way. I had different designs I needed to work on that had deadlines and so I didn't actually get started until a few weeks ago. But this is one that I'm very excited about. It's a slightly peculiar colourwork design which I'm really enjoying. So you can see I'm most of the way through the body now. I'm making a size smaller than I usually would. For my designs I usually wear a size two. My sizes aren't 100% consistent in terms of their measurements and things but there will pretty much always be 10 sizes in my garment patterns. I pretty much always make a size two for myself with a few exceptions depending on the sort of fit I want. Often for yoke jumpers and things I'll include a fairly similar amount of ease. And with this one, excuse me, I wanted a slightly closer fitting one and I'm going to make it slightly cropped and it's going to have shorter sleeves so it'll be a nice layering piece for once things cool down a little. And with the yoke you can see I've got some short row shaping at the back there. I think I've mentioned before of my love of Art Nouveau design and I've often gone for a slightly simplified take on the Art Nouveau aesthetic. With this one I wanted to kind of get some of the more elaborate details in there and I sort of wanted it to feel like a Tiffany's lamp or something. Just something quite, not decadent, but definitely very ornate. And so it's got the sort of swoopy intersecting lines that I really enjoy and then various little kind of interesting motifs in there. And it's completely abstract, it isn't really based on anything. I haven't got a name for it yet but I'm hoping to be finished with this one in the next couple of weeks and then I'll be putting out a call for test knitters and then hopefully I'll be releasing that sometime in the autumn. So yeah I think I'm going to offer it as a shorter sleeve version and then a full length sleeve version. The yarn I'm using, which I probably should have mentioned before, is my Mendip 4-ply yarn. I'm using both on the Stormy colourway, which is, sorry, on the Stormy base, which is a naturally beige, heathery base. The main colour for the body is Beach, which is this one here. It's a sort of warm, slightly purpley-reddy brown and then the contrast colour is Teal. And I did debate when I was picking the colours for this, I debated using the Teal on the Sunny base, which is a naturally white base, which would have given more contrast and it's a slightly lighter colour and I think that would look beautiful as well but I decided to go for the slightly lower contrast version, which I think is really nice and so I hope you're going to like this one. It'll be really fun to see how that one goes down. I can never tell how my designs are going to be received, I generally just go by creating things that I really enjoy and hope that other people like them too, which I think is the only way I can really do it. If I started trying to follow trends and things I'd probably get a bit lost and it would stop feeling like me. So yes, I love colour work, I love coming up with colour work designs, especially yoke designs where there are a few more factors at play rather than just a simple interlocking motif or something. With the yoke you've got to have the increases built in or decreases if you're working bottom up and there's just quite a few factors coming into that and I find it a really fun sort of both creative but also slightly geometric and mathematical challenge and I hope that the result of me enjoying basically playing around is something that people also enjoy. That's all the knitting I'm going to show you in this episode because I've just been working on that one. I do have a couple of designs that I'm going to be starting work on very soon. One is a yarn partnership with a company that I've worked with before and another is for a magazine that'll be published some way down the road. I'm now going to show you a couple of the other things I've been working on. Now I know quite a few of you have been enjoying my recent basket making exploits from the last few months and quite a few times when I've mentioned baskets that I've made from locally found and foraged fibres, plants that grow in our local woodlands or in the garden. I've mentioned that I have a big bundle of willow that I'm looking forward to working with and I had mentioned that I needed to wait until the weather warmed up because I would need to work outside for some of it because it's rather a bigger project than I've done so far with the basket making and I'm really excited with how it's going so I'm going to show you. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to go because it's big. Oh lord! Okay so we've got some escapee willow it's fine it'll all work. So this is the basket I'm making if I can turn it this way oh I can actually see through the base of the basket so it's a pretty big one. It's definitely bigger than any of the other baskets I've made before. This is a stake and stand basket nope stake and strand I get that wrong pretty much every time. So the stakes are these upright ones which form the framework and then the strands are these ones I hope you can see here they are the ones that get woven in and out and go round and round and round. So with this one I've made a and then all of the stick that is up here that will then be bent down and used to weave the border of the basket which makes a really strong border. Let's put that down there it looks like it's going to try and ping me in the face. So there are quite a few things that I'm really loving about this project. The first that is very apparent with it just right there is the fact that the willow smells gorgeous. It's a difficult one to describe because it's kind of almost a spicy smell it smells like a bit of when you go to the garden centre at Christmas and they've got the Christmas section and you've got all of that combination of things like oranges and various woven things and yeah it's a really really lovely smell and it's a surprising thing that I love about working with willow that I had never really anticipated. So this willow is from a willow farm I guess down on Somerset levels so not too far from me. They do workshops and things I would really like to go down there and visit at some point once we're getting out and doing a few more things. I tend to be a bit of a shut-in I work from home and quite enjoy my own company so I spend a lot of time here and working on all the crafty stuff. That's kept me quite entertained so I haven't really felt the need to immediately launch myself into all of the activities again now that in the UK at least things have opened up. We'll see how it goes but yes I would love to go and visit where the willow is harvested. It's something that I would like to grow myself but my garden is a reasonable size for an English garden like in a suburban area but as it's a rented property and the garden isn't huge I wouldn't be able to plant it a massive distance away from houses and from what I have heard willow is very thirsty and has very adventurous roots which will go searching for any kind of water they can find which when planted within a certain distance of modern plumbing systems can apparently be problematic. But yes really really enjoying making this basket the method I'm using is one that I learned when I did a basket making workshop at Farnham Maltings which if you're in the UK is where Unravel Festival is held so you might have heard of it. Yeah this just is quite a satisfying thing to do and it's got to the point where I mean I've always been a hoarder of cardboard boxes things that parcels arrive in and it's nice to be able to put the cardboard box in the recycling and put the things that were in the box into a nice handmade basket it's just a little bit nicer and generally most of the investment with the baskets is in the time spent weaving them with the willow there's a small investment in getting the material but if you know someone who grows willow you might be able to ask if you can harvest some because it grows rampantly and often needs to be cut back quite regularly and then with other ones I've used free materials that I've just been able to forage about the place and so it's really nice to have that as something where I can just very gradually I don't want to use the word upgrade because but make the things I surround myself with a little bit nicer for very little monetary cost I rather enjoy the investment being time spent and knowing that I've put some care into the things that are around me so on that note I'm going to spend a little bit of time with you working on some yarn that I've been spinning out in the garden if you've watched previously you might recognize this blend this is one that hasn't yet been upgraded to a basket and this is the one that was a mixture of orange bright pink and purple and yellow fiber a variety of fibers there's various breeds of wool some soy and a bit of mohair in there and so I've made one skein already I have a couple of bobbins ready to go and so I'm just going to be spending a little bit of relaxing time plying those and enjoying the flowers in the garden because it's gorgeously sunny and it just makes me happy to watch them so it'll probably be a couple of days at the rate I'm going before I have finished plying up that yarn and then I just have this amount of fiber left to spin up I haven't actually weighed how much I've got left but I'm expecting to end up with maybe 350 to 400 grams of yarn in total and it's a project I'm taking fairly slowly and just enjoying when I can dedicate some time to it and at the same time mulling over what I might like to knit with it because it's a really really lovely yarn is coming out with I think I might aim for a project that is designed to be knit from yarn like a wool yarn held together with a mohair so you get that bit of halo because the yarn itself does have quite a nice bit of fuzz to it and I think that'll be a really nice effect so it's really enjoyable to just take quite a long time I think I've been working on this for maybe a couple of months so far maybe a bit more but I like slow ongoing projects and especially when I'm making the yarn just taking time to think about what I'm going to make with it sometimes I set out to make yarn for a particular pattern knowing what sort of yarn I'm aiming for other times I just want to work with particular fibers and then once I've got the yarn know exactly how much I have I will see what seems appropriate and then generally make a load of modifications to the pattern because that's what I tend to do I like that with hand spun yarn I let myself knit other people's patterns because I tend to do what most of my knitting these days is for designs that I'm coming up with hand spun projects I mean I sort of set aside a little bit of time for knitting where I don't have to think as much about it I don't have to do a lot of maths associated with it and yeah it's nice and relaxing and also it means like I prefer not to design with hand spun yarn just because it's it's already difficult to come up with designs for specific yarns and then they're not available in certain places and then people ask for recommendations for substitutions and if you're using hand spun yarn it's it's very very difficult to recommend substitutions I tend not to recommend substitutions as a rule like if someone approaches me and say would this yarn work for this pattern I can say well from what I can say often I won't be familiar with the yarn in person because I haven't worked with all the yarn out there but you know generally looking at the spec of two commercial yarns you can compare and generally be able to get a decent idea of if they're going to knit up in a vaguely similar way whereas with hand spun there can be so many things going on there that designing for hand spun sort of ends up being its own thing which I don't think it should be but yes it just it works out nicely that when I spin my own yarn I allow myself to knit patterns that I might not if I were buying the yarn so yeah on that note I hope you have enjoyed this month's episode I really want to thank the people who have joined on Patreon it's really really lovely to see that little community building over there I'll put a link to my Patreon below subscribers over there can get they get access to an additional video every month which is usually on a specific topic or craft or part of a project that I'm working on there are also discounts available for my yarns and patterns there is a monthly zoom call and recently I've created a discord server for all of my patrons so it's a nice place just to chat about what people are working on and hopefully a place where people can connect and chat about their projects if you want to find me in between podcast episodes you can follow me on Instagram where I share updates of what I'm working on and there's my newsletter which is a little bit quiet at the moment but that's the place to be for any updates with new patterns and product releases and things and so yeah if you have any questions about anything I've talked about in this episode please do ask them in the comments below it might take me a little while to get back to you just because I'm not spending a huge amount of time on the computer at the moment but I will get back to you eventually and yeah I hope you've enjoyed this episode I hope you're having a lovely summer if you're in the northern hemisphere um if you're in the southern have a nice winter and I hope you're staying warm and until next time