The Annual issue 4 – articles, tutorials and puzzles!
Our Annual is jam-packed with lots of goodies (as well as the seven spectacular patterns) including tutorials, articles, and of course, puzzles! We love the vintage Annuals of childhoods past and really love recreating a little of their fun and silliness in ours each year. We also enjoy finding out more about our woolly world with interviews and tutorials that we hope you find interesting and inspiring as much as we do.
This year we have two tutorials if you fancy trying some new things out. One is on flower-bundle natural dyeing with Alice of Woolmatters who is local to us in the West Country and has a wonderful eye for colour and an innovative technique for getting a speckled effect on yarn. The other is an embroidery stitch guide and sampler template from Lorna of Stitchbirdie where you can learn a number of techniques and try out your own embroidered flowers.
If you’re looking for more general inspiration we have an interview with designer Dee Hardwicke, whose beautiful colourwork knitwear draws on her background in graphic tile design and painting amongst other things! We also have an article about how we create our coloured shades of yarn and tops (a follow on from our MOW talk) and an introduction to Kevin, our spinner, if you want a sneak peak behind the scenes here at the mill!
We also managed to get out and about in Devon doing some research for our Craft & Gardening Map of Devon – all the best places to wander through the flowers and enjoy a cream tea! Then we popped along to one of the local farmers that supply us to meet all their new lambs and learn about their history and day to day life.
And the Annual wouldn’t be complete without some fun puzzles to test your skills! This year we have Mill-doku (mill-themed sudoku), Connections, Where’s the Woollens, Match the Tops, a Bug Hunt through the pages and of course the Crossword too. All of these and several of the articles are wonderfully illustrated by a bunch of very talented artists who we are always in awe of when they produce such amazing work.
We hope you will enjoy this issue of the Annual and let us know what your favourite bits are and what we might be missing! We always welcome suggestions and if you fancy contributing yourself please do have a look at our submissions page – we welcome all sorts of items not just knitwear!