Vote for the Best in British Knits

Voting for the British Knitting Awards for 2014 is now open. There are 20 categories ranging from favorite yarns and companies to the best book of the year and favorite designer.

Two new categories this year are Best Brand for British Yarn and Best Yarn Shop Day Experience.

I’m pretty sure you can vote even if you don’t live in the UK, if you happen to be a big fan of British knitting brands. The voting is taking place in a Survey Monkey survey.

To encourage people to vote, Let’s Knit (a British knitting magazine that puts on the contest) is giving one person a £500 stash of goodies from the winning companies to include yarn, needles, books and knitting accessories.

I’m not seeing that the site says when voting is done, but the results will be announced in the November issue of Let’s Knit, which hits newsstands Oct. 24, so vote soon if you want your thoughts included!

Check out the winners from last year.

[Photo via Let’s Knit.]

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

Comments

Have you read?