Thought I would witter a bit today about some rather nice yarn.  Artesano have some lovely alpaca and alpaca / wool mixes in their range, Jane and Jess of Quinton Chadwick used the 4-ply alpaca in their Loveday cardigan for The Knitter last year (pattern available here soon).

I quite fancy the Nick Atkinson Madison Avenue dress from the latest issue of The Knitter, but knitted in the Artesano Aran 50 wool / 50% alpaca in a nice cream or pale grey for winter. Here’s a swatch of the leaf design in this dress, not the easiest thing in the world to knit but not the hardest either. Obviously this seatch is not the Artesano stuff, it’s some wool I had lying around.

You can see from this how the inc / dec ratio to make the leaf shape distorts the knitting, which is why the pattern stops at a very precise row in order to then work each side of the neck to make up the required armhole depth. Clever. Disclaimer here: I know Nick, and I know he is very clever indeed when it comes to knitting.

At the moment Artesano are also offering a free Nick Atkinson pattern, providing you fill in their questionaire. I’ve just done that and it’s not too onerous, so do have a go if you’d like the pattern. There’s no option to just fill the questionnaire in without leaving your name and email address to have the pattern sent to you so if you don’t fancy that then probably best not to bother with the the questions. It’s not just a .pdf download. They’re also having a draw in February and 5 peeps who have filled in the questionnaire can win the yarn to knit the pattern in, so if you fancy free yarn it’s also probably worth a go. Pootle over to the website through one of the links above and it should be easy enough to find (feeling lazy now and in need of tea, unable to add another link into the post!)

So here we go with the first of our batch of accessory patterns and the first pattern for TBk by the lovely Jane and Jess at Quinton & Chadwick. Armwarmers and a Headband to keep out Winter draughts.





Knitted in Rowan Pure Wool Aran, the set of Armwarmers and Headband together takes 2 balls. The Armwarmers shown here in the S/M size took exactly one ball of yarn when we knitted them, so if you don’t fancy a Headband you should just get away with the one ball (if your tension matches ours), sadly not for the larger size unless you have some contrasting yarn to work the garter stitch borders in.

The Armwarmers are knitted in the round and the headband flat. There’s a lovely chain selvedge edge on the headband to help prevent the edges from flaring which makes a lovely detail. They’re all knitted on 4.5mm needles, so they grow quite quickly meaning you don’t have to have cold hands next week if you don’t want to (can you believe the clocks go back on Sunday morning? It’ll be hometime in the dark again!). You can download the pattern here.