Fibre Factor Challenge 4

It’s Wednesday again, time for some Wacky, Whimsical and Wonderful Wednesdayness?

This week I am starting with ‘what I like to call news’ (A little Miranda Hart humour for you there). Challenge 4 of the Fibre Factor is well underway, for those of you now scratching your heads, shame on you! Great to see Cat Bordhi and Lucy Neatby on the judging panel. Cat Bordhi always makes me laugh, check out her youtube video for Judy Becker’s Magic Cast on . This is so funny, and of course informative, but Cat has a style all of her own… I love her. Lucy Neatby taught me to knit socks, well kind of, not in person but via DVD. Lucy is an excellent teacher and I am looking forward to hearing her comments on the designs this round.

I settled down to read about challenge number 4 and I nearly choked! Knitting machine… KNITTING MACHINE?! This is where I started to read a bit too quickly and made one or two wrong assumptions [Doug say’s I do this a lot, what does he know? okay, guilty as charged]. My mind had gone off, outraged that these poor contestants had had thrust at them a flatbed knitting machine and given two weeks to master it and design and produce a garment, no accessories allowed. What’s this about a knitting machine? Now I am quite an open minded kinda girl, don’t blush at much. I’m all for the combining of crafts and techniques, that is all the trend at the moment, the uniting of knitting and crochet for instance. I do both, I am bicraftual. BUT, knitting machines, I have dabbled, but thrusting a knitting machine at the contestants and asking for a garment designed using hand knit and machine knit, that’s cruelty.

So I made a cuppa, chilled a bit and read some more…. Oh ok, it’s not one of the clunky old flatbed machines, it’s an Addi King Size Express Knitting Machine. I have had a quick look at some of the demo video’s and I could see myself getting carried away playing with one of these. I could knit flat, or in the round, no need for special, waxed machine yarn, no fancy casting off methods to learn…. Uh oh I am getting sucked into the world of possibilities. Check out the progress videos that the contestants have posted, what would you do with that challenge?

What has had me laughing this week, has to be Franklin Habit. I am confident that every single one of you knows Franklin and that you probably follow his blog, it is beautiful, funny and heart warming. But do you follow him on twitter? This week his tweets have been of a somewhat erm, ‘saucy’ nature.

So tweet of the week goes to @FranklinHabit

“When pattern writing, it’s “buttonholes, “not “buttholes, ” Obviously my mind is on weekend, not work.”

Finally, Katie found this and wanted to share with you all