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!)