Thursday, October 12, 2006

Getting the puns out of the way...

Hello my darlings,

My name is Ellen. I'm a teacher who knits. Despite being on a training course at the moment AND having a full timetable, and a loving boyfriend and lovely flat to look after, I have decided that for at least the next year, I am going to enter as many knitting competitions as I can. I'm going to document my successes and failures here, and of course put up the patterns (once I can work out how to do it) I come up with as I go. If they win a prize and get published elsewhere, you'll get a link to the pattern or the name of the magazine. If they don't win, or don't get printed, then I'm going to stick them up on this blog, probably as shiny Acrobat files that you can download.

I'll post links to the competitions I'm entering- and if you know of any knitting/crochet competitions happening, I'd love to hear about them so please add a comment to tell me about them!

I will not however include any of the following jokes beyond this post (hopefully):
1) Any reference to 'purls of wisdom' or 'casting (on) my purls before swine'
2) Any jokes that involve me being 'in stitches'.
3) Replacing the word 'it's' with the word 'knit's'.
4) Changing any OTHER word that rhymes with 'knit' to 'knit'.

I'll start with my first competition, which sadly I was not victorious in. Apparently, the judges of the Glamour Knitting Competition did not consider knitted nipple tassels to be wild enough for the Wild Knitting category. Perhaps I should have entered them as wearable. Either that, or my finished product, in hot pink Patons Fab and sparkly Spritz yarns, was just not glamorous enough (both the yarns have lots of acrylic in them).

I hope it wasn't to do with the yarn, because I had to stash-dive for the project. My stash has been quietly taking over my lounge, with the result that my Gorgeous Significant Other made the comment that he thought I was, in fact, the proud owner of a flock of tiny sheep. This means I have not bought any new yarn for a while. Except for the huge bag of pink and orange fun fur, which was only a fiver, and which the GSO's sister talked me into. No really.

The next couple of competitions which have come to my attention are the fabulous Purlescence Storytellers Design contest - what WOULD Cinderella knit?- the prize being the yarn and needles you need for your design (I'm guessing there will be a lot of cashmere entries)

and the
Simply Knitting Magazine sock knitting contest (no website link as the magazine doesn't have one, but it seems to be readily available at WH Smith and Borders Books)- design a pair of socks for a famous person, real or imaginary, and win lots of Colinette yarn.

The trouble with both these contests is that what I THINK Cinderella would knit might not be what the people running the contest want to have on their website, similarly the famous person I want to design socks for might not appeal to the people judging the contest, going on the kind of patterns that show up in the magazine.

More, probably including the pattern for my Dita Von Tassels, later!

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