Makepeace McEvoy

While there's life...

It's my birthday on Wednesday. I shall be 61. I think I'm going to take a day off for it, so your next entry won't be till Friday. And I also think this would be a very good time to go into a bit

Gallimaufry 2

I'm very pleased to say that I have almost finished the grey socks, as you see in the photo. Note that there is no actual green in the grey; that's just the camera being weird again, as it so frequently does. It's simply a

Green for danger

In my last post I touched very briefly on the perils of living in Victorian England, and, in particular, the ubiquity of poisonous heavy metals. Today I'd like to go into that in a little more depth, because dyes are obviously an important part of the history of

A bone to pick

I have written before about the perils of fitting corsets, or anything else with any boning. But let me get one thing absolutely straight: a properly fitting corset is, in fact, very comfortable. Naturally there are limits to how tightly one can sensibly lace, but these do depend very much

Volume control

I caved recently and joined the Cashmerette Club. Well, they had a generous discount on it. If they supplied paper patterns as a matter of course I'd have joined ages ago, because it really is excellent if you sew and you have curves; but they don't.

Mending their nets

I have probably mentioned before that my sister is fond of saying that anyone can knit, but what makes a real knitter is the ability to fix mistakes. That goes for any craft; and netting is no exception. There are really only two major things you can do wrong in

Panel games

I really want to get my Easter class excited about netting and what can be done with it; so I plan to bring a few samples to show them. There will, obviously, be a string bag. There will be the stole (I'm not going to link any particular

Colourless green ideas

I have previously touched on the redemption of acrylic as a knitting yarn, from being that stuff you didn't knit with unless you were too poor to afford anything else to becoming a really good (but still cheap) option. I've also mentioned acrylic-based sock yarn, something

String fever

I mentioned not so long ago that I'm going to be doing a netting class on Holy Saturday. Let me talk a bit about how that's currently going. My original idea was to have up to nine people, preferably not too many of them children, and

750 Knitting Stitches

Last week I reviewed the one book you need to buy if you can already knit and you want to understand it in depth and take things further. Today I'm going to review the book to buy if you can't yet knit but you wish you

Yipes, stripes!

That King Cole Footsie yarn I mentioned in an earlier post looked as if it had everything going for it. The colours are lovely; it's a quarter the price of the Tencel blend I used for the yellow-mix socks, but it's still vegan; it's

Chaotic alignment

You know I said last time that nobody ever talks about "4-ply" meaning two different things on opposite sides of the Atlantic? Well, this time I've got something even more fundamental to do with knitting that nobody ever talks about, and it's this. How