Skip to main content

Winning

I went to Stitch London's Christmas meet up on Monday night. As well as catching up with old friends and meeting some lovely new knitters there was a raffle.

Now I used to run lots of raffles when I organised p/hop and as I was the organiser I couldn't enter. I din't mind this as the money we raised helped MSF's incredible work, though I did covet some of the prizes we were donated. So it was with some excitement entered Stitch London's raffle buying a few tickets as the money was going to Great Ormond Street Hospital, my old workplace. I'd entered their raffle last year too but didn't win anything so wasn't holding out much hope.

Low and behold my name came out of the hat bag not once, not twice, but a cracking seven times, including drawing my own name three times. While I was pretty pleased by this it did seem excessive so I turned down some prizes when I drew my own name out plus gave one away. However, with some encouragement from Deadlyknitshade, I came home with some pretty nifty swag.

Raffle Swag

First up is this delightful woodpecker badge made by the talented Teasemade, perfect for me as I'm a bit of a closet ornithologist. The colours are beautiful and capture the essence of the great spotted woodpecker beautifully.

Raffle Swag

Next is this inspirational card from Craftivists with this spot on message:

Raffle Swag

And finally the yarn. Oh, the yarn. You might be aware that I've been on a yarn diet this year. While I have indulged in a few items I've only bought one skein of sock yarn all year so this was very exciting.

Raffle Swag

It's from new dyer Trailing Clouds. The yarn is called Mind the Gap and is, drumroll please, self striping! I'm saving this for when I catch up on The Killing III over the Christmas break as I can only knit plain stocking stitch when reading Danish subtitles.

How do you say "ssh, I'm knitting and reading subtitles" in Danish?

Comments

christunte said…
You say 'shh, jeg strikker og læser undertekster'.
What lovely prizes! I think it's great you finally got the chance to win!

Popular posts from this blog

Lashing and lashings...

As well as talk of Clementine Cake on twitter there has been talk of brewing Ginger Beer. Ginger beer is my drink of choice and I'm always in search of a good one. I find many commercial ones too sweet. Once on holiday in Brasil I had a ginger beer made with freshly squeezed ginger which is the gold standard at the moment and a tough act to live up to. @eskimimi (who has a lovely blog ) linked to this River Cottage recipe last week . I had to hunt around for brewers yeast as the brewer's yeast you can buy in chemists and health food shops is deactivated so won't work for brewing, despite the name. (trade descriptions act anyone?). I ended up buying my yeast online after consulting my brewing guru Bioniclaura . As well as knitting Laura brews her own beer, which I got sample when I stayed with her and her lovely dog and husband in Dublin when I went over at the end of October. More on that later. I couldn't wait to get started but had to wait til we returned from Hasti...

Just beet it - part II

Here it is. The beetroot dye experiment results. I had read that beetroot turns a disappointing orange colour when the dye is set. The most saturated end turned a beautiful burnished orange however the far end of the skein, which had been a delicate shade of pale pink before cooking was a mucky yellow. The cream/mucky yellow colour dominated the skein and wasn't as graduated as I'd hoped for. I decided to redye the cream section, leaving a small section of the Naples Yellow (mucky yellow) for contrast (I actually like the colour in small amounts and looked up a nicer name in my Artists Colour Manual). I added a few drops of pink food colouring to the beetroot vinegar just to see what happened and over dyed the mid portion of orange with more beetroot vinegar with a few drops of red food colouring. This is how it looked while drying... ...ta dah ! Here it is reskeined . Well half the skein anyway. I was in a rush as I wanted to enter it in a dip dyeing competition on Ravelry w...

Knit Nation

I've been busy over the last week taking p/hop to the Knit Nation festival in London. It was good fun but I'm still a little dazed from 3 full on days of talking to knitters. It was fab and I've met some brilliant people so I will share it in photo form. Here's our stand, manned by yellowpurplezebra and cybil. Bad pub photos from Friday night with Stitch London Stitchettes, WoollyWormhead, @julietillyflop (who makes fab knitting tea towels ) Babylonglegs, @knitterbird and Bionic Laura (who stayed with me and brought me some gorgeous Aran yarn from Ireland) There was a grout baby and also some tipsy yelling at Ysolda and Sazknits and Jess and Casey the marvellous people who made Ravelry when we spotted them on the way to the tube. On Saturday I made sure I had time to shop and bought some sock yarn from Renaisance Dyeing... ... creepily fabulous stitch markers from The Bothered Owl ... As well as a fab needle roll with Mexican Day of the Dead pattern I also bought some...