Briswool

Briswool, Bristol

Over the last few months, the owner of my local craft store, Vicky Harrison from Paper Village, has been leading Briswool – a project to recreate the city of Bristol in wool. The model was finally revealed last week, and I got a chance to peek in at it on Saturday.

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The Matthew

More than 100 volunteers worked on making the piece, knitting and crocheting foliage, boats, balloons, trees and cars from Vicky’s patterns, plus all the Bristol landmarks one would expect to see. The model completely takes over the Paper Village shop, where it will be exhibited there until the 27th May.

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Clifton coloured houses

The project is still growing and Briswool will be running two free workshops in October, to coincide with the model showing in the M-shed.  Participants will learn knitting and crochet techniques for designing and making more of the local buildings of Bristol and the city centre, and helping to sew pieces together.

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The Harbourside

 

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Clifton Suspension Bridge

It’s lovely to have this sort of thing happening around the corner and to see that the shop is generating so much interest! Links have popped up from media all over the world covering it, and queues were so long on their opening day they had to turn people away! 

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The Watershed

Spot the needlefelt fox:

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Cabot Tower

 

More information on Briswool and details to get involved can be found on the Paper Village Facebook page, which is updated regularly.

 

The socks that almost never were..

I’m finished, at last! These socks were nearly a gonner last week, when I managed to drop my knitting bag in Victoria Park and lose them halfway through sock number two.  Luckily, through the powers of Twitter, I was able to get them back! Someone had saved them from being eaten by playful puppies and handed them in to Mrs Brown’s Cafe in the middle of the park.

Although sadly at some point the lovely bag they were in was snapped up by someone less honest.  It was just a tote bag, from Windmill Hill city farm, but  I was given it when I worked in the Windmill pub, and it made me feel part of a nice community.  It saddens me to think that the person that took must also be part of that community that I felt was so friendly.  I’m consoling myself with the fact that I got my knitting back, and that I could always go and buy another bag, but it’s not quite the same.

The yarn is Regia Mix-it, and the pattern just a toe up formula I was trying out. I’m making a bunch of stocking stitch socks as my “bus knitting”, which hopefully my feet will appreciate come winter!

Art on the Hill 2012

This last couple of weeks have been pretty manic for me, sorting out bits and bobs for Art on the Hill which took place this weekend.  This was the first arts trail I’ve done and wasn’t sure what to expect.

So me, being me, left a majority of it until the last minute and worked largely on updating pattern formats so they were all nice and consistent, and creating a nice template so all future ones will follow suit.

I also wasn’t sure how many knitters exactly live in South Bristol so was taking a bit of a gamble selling patterns!

To bulk it all out a bit I got sewing again, something I’ve been a little slack on recently. A couple of years ago I made these aprons, which went down really well at arts fairs and in the local pub/cafe where I was selling them in Sussex.

It was nice to get back into the sewing vibe again and make a selection of baby clothes too. Again these are things that I was selling when living in Brighton that were popular with the local Mums and Dads. All the left over pieces are now in my Etsy shop, so if you have your eye on something here then take a look!

All in all the weekend was a success, meeting with other knitters and artists, and just sitting and chatting with people about my patterns was really lovely. Its great when you know a product so well you are confident answering questions about it – I’ve done so much retail work in the past for people and nothing beats selling things you have created yourself.


I even managed to come away with a yarn bowl from my good friends Lucy and Pete!