I’m still recuperating from my fall on the ice, but I’m getting out a little more, and no longer confining myself to being tucked up in bed much of the day, under hand-knit blankets, with Chewbacca and a home-made footwarmer, reading, listening to music, and following the current controversy about publication contract terms for knitting designers, which are at the same level they were in 1986.
1986! Can you believe that? 21 years ago? What?
I started my own website because, pleased though I might have been to have a first pattern accepted, the offer was so bad I couldn’t take it. I thought I’d be better off as an independent, and I have been, with your good company and continuing support.
As the designers join together to try to obtain better terms, please do support them, where you can, by buying their patterns direct.
 Anyway, this has put me in touch with other designers, and their work. Chris de Longpre, of Knitting at K Noon gets my recommendation this month for her huggable stuffed animals from her Safari Friends series--a fine winter project for the little kids you know. Her entire pattern line is available through http://www.jimmybeanswool.com
Winter is a great time for larger knitting projects, I think, now that all the Christmas gifts are done, and the weather seems to be settling in for a somewhat gloomy long haul. It’s ideal for blankets and afghans, sweaters, big shawls, and techniques that will stretch your skills.
And if you have ice where you are, please get yourself a pair of Yak Trax, and use them; the day of the fall was bright and sunny, so I’d forgotten to put them on before we went on our morning walk. My daughter has also ordered, in consideration of her mother’s greying and battered head, an English sheepskin aviator’s helmet, warm and well padded, that will make me look like Snoopy as the WWI pilot. So what? Next time, that loud crack might not be the ice my skull hit and broke, but the skull itself.
And if I can devise a knitting pattern for the helmet, I will.
Knit on,
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