A knitter's progress

We're getting a bit nostalgic again. Our last Memory Lane post was about the start of this blog and thus back to the very beginning of This Is Knit. The next big step after Blackrock was opening the first half of the Powerscourt Centre shop in September of 2008. Ten months later, we moved entirely into town (you can see the announcement of the move and pictures of the second unit looking awfully stark here). Before the move, Thursday Knit Night happened in the shop. After, it found another venue, and new people came along that hadn't found Blackrock easy to get to. One of these was a new knitter called Julie (she's elven on Ravelry). Like lots of others, she started with a simple and lovely scarf: She came along to the 2009 Yarn Tasting, and asked if she could bring her camera. This was the result. Our jaws dropped. Then her knitting got more adventurous. In the 2010 Summer KAL, she made this stunning Annis, full of lovely nupps: A Louisa Harding pattern (Ribbon) was the starting point for a lovely shrug, heavily modified and then given the edging from another (Fantasy). The lustrous blue yarn is Rossetti in Azure. Winter 2010 came along, and we had a month of snow. The up side of this was that we got to meet Murphy, whom Julie had made from samples from the 2010 Yarn Tasting. He likes a bit of snow, does Murphy. Most lace knitters embark on a Swallowtail shawl at some point (there's more than 8,700 projects on Ravelry, every one beautiful). Julie's Swallowtail is a little different from the others, though - she combined Swallowtail with several other lace patterns to make Nyx. It's wonderful watching our customers' skills develop, and it's one of the reasons we love seeing what you make. It's also why we watch the FO Parade thread in our Ravelry group so avidly. It makes our day when we see what you've made, so please, show us the pretty!