I love designing. I love knitting. It’s something that soothes me. It lovely to feel gorgeous yarns gently flowing through my fingers as I slowly make simple stitches. I love sharing this joy with my simple patterns with you.
I knit all year round, no matter what the weather. When you use natural fibres, like merino, they are cooling just as much as they are warming.
In Yorkshire we’ve had some barmy hot days, yet as I write this (on the 2nd June 2017) there is a light summer rain cooling us down, which to me means sitting and knitting watching the rain replenish the soil as I replenish my soul!
Tory the Cowl is knitted in a very special stitch – it has different names depending on where you look, the blackberry stitch or the Trinity stitch. I love calling it the Trinity stitch, it brings together what I believe to be the three joys of knitting: simple design, gorgeous natural fibres and calming minds.
I named it Tory after a part of Bradford on Avon, my childhood home. Tory refers to the old word tor, meaning a hill and these trinity stitches look like little mounds of hills!
Traditionally designers don’t introduce a cowl to keep your neck warm after some of the hottest days of the year 2017 so far! However as I mentioned, I’m always designing and sometimes that creates a little backlog and before I know it some of my designs are ‘left in the bag’ and I forget about them!
This is what has happened with Tory the Cowl – I designed it so long ago that I kept forgetting about it, so I thought I’d do it now before it gets lost underneath all the other designs I’ve been working on recently.
However because it only takes 3 balls in chunky to make it’s a great summer project to get completed and ready for later in the year.
I’ve used the Soft Donegal for the cowl, it’s 100% merino and is spun in Donegal, Ireland to create a traditional tweed yarn which means as you knit with it you will see other colours twinkling through…some don’t reveal themselves to you until you start knitting the third ball! It’s the kind of yarn I love.
Traditionally spun with traditional values, love and passion.
