The Return of Social Knitting

Since the darling Flo came into my life obviously lots has changed and that includes my knitting being, shall we say, a bit up in the air. One of my favourite things about knitting is the social aspect of it. As one of the founding members of S&B London, which was the biggest knitting group in the UK at the time, I was meeting, teaching and knitting with new people at least once a week for four years! That’s a lot of social knitting. However, the only people I’ve been knitting with for the last few months have been the cast of Grey’s Anatomy or True Blood during the odd quiet night in front of the TV. So it was like an angel from above when I received an email from a fellow new mum telling me about a knitting group started by my local NCT group (National Childbirth Trust).

It was hard to contain my excitement at the prospect of a weekly night of knitting again and after two weeks of meetings I’m already starting to feel at home. It’s been so lovely to sit amongst a group of new people and have a good natter about everything from kids to yarn, TV to road rage and suitable birthday gifts to the new John Lewis opening in Stratford by the end of the year (which we’ve talked about at both meetings so far and I think we’re going to continue talking about until it opens and we’ve bled it dry of yarn).

Having people to knit with always gives me so much inspiration. Just seeing what others are working on, the yarns and finished projects fires up my creative juices and makes me want to start about a thousand projects all at once. But I am restraining myself to working on the Hap Blanket by Ysolda Teague. This is basically a simple large garter stitch square until I get to the border but the simplicity of the project is giving me the head space to relax. I think if I attempted anything too taxing at the moment that I’d have a bit of a knitting meltdown.

The lovely photo of Flo in my last post and the one here of the Hap Blanket came from my latest photo shoot with my good friend and trusty photographer James Diggle. You can check out his amazing photography here.