Moebius... Entrelac... Toll Road!! Moebius... Entrelac... Market!!

One thing you can say for running a knitting shop, you will never lack for variety!! Over the past month, I've designed two new patterns for classes, accepted an invite to run a stall at the Luna Night Market and received a letter from the government telling me that my home is going to be demolished as part of the East-West link... admittedly, that last is not directly related to the shop, but it is another interesting challenge that I'm going to have to fit in around the winter rush.

Cowl-Leidoscope
(c) Andrea Tappe

This is the Cowl-leidoscope, the project for the Moebius Cast Ons class. We've run the Moebius class once already (first Sunday afternoon in July) and we'll be running it again on the first Sunday afternoon in September. The class covers five ways to create a Moebius scarf or shawl: participants can knit the Cowl-leidoscope as part of the session.

In alternate months (August and October), we'll be running an introduction to entrelac - sadly, the demo is not at a stage where it's ready to photograph. (That's another way of saying I've only just started casting it on this afternoon!). Expect to see a pic of the Tweedy Garterlac Scarf soon on our FB page!

When it's finished, it will look vaguely like the photo below- except it will be striped in a finer tweed yarn and done in squares, not rectangles... so only very vaguely like!!

What entrelac looks like

The Luna Night Market has been our next challenge - for four Wednesday Nights in August, we will be at Stall G21 in J Shed with our brand new Giant Yarn Crate from 5pm to 10pm. This is going to make Wednesday a pretty long day, since I usually start at 5:30am with a circuit at the local gym... But I'm sure I can survive for one month!

The goal with the market is to have a good range of projects, with things to tempt impulse purchasers while also making sure that people know that we have the wherewithal to help them knit, crochet or tricot a full garment. The last weekend in July will probably be dedicated to making up Spiderweb Scarf packs with our stock of Rare Comfort Kid Mohair, putting together a Pom-Pom and French Knitter kit for the kids and maybe whipping up a kit for the Rare Yarns Lace Gauntlets or a Misti Alpaca two-yarn scarf... I have to think very hard about this, since there's only so much I can fit in the crate! Apparently anything over 300kgs and it's likely to collapse ;)

Spiderweb Scarf

To market, to market...

The birthday cape - about half finished

And finally... the toll road. Not much to say there, except to hope that I'm going to get a friend's birthday present finished much faster than I expected, since I'm crocheting on the way to and from the protests - and sometimes crocheting during them as well. I figure if Madame Defarge could knit in the shadow of the guillotine, the least I can do is crochet woolly capes as I wait for the bulldozers to show up!

The cape is a nifty little thing that my friend picked off the Garnstudio website - I didn't have a colour in Twilleys 100% chunky wool that she liked, but I've substituted one of the New Zealand Naturally yarns, which is working extremely well. It's one of those patterns where you have to have faith - I crocheted the first couple of rows and was convinced that the pattern and/or the substitution was a dud - it looked terrible!! However, over time, the pattern started to emerge and the cape started to look more like the photograph... a good analogy for the situation with the toll road - it has started out looking pretty awful, but hopefully it will improve over time!!