Musings

Here at This Is Knit, we're very big fans of Ravelry. It's useful in choosing patterns, it's useful for substituting yarn, it's useful for asking advice (after all, where else can you find thousands of crocheters and knitters eager to answer your every question?). But there's many other ways in which the combined wisdom of the Ravelry crowd can be...

May we introduce Animal? Animal is an angora rabbit whom we had the opportunity to meet earlier today - she's currently on holiday at Shauna's Pet Shop on Capel Street, and since we don't often get the chance to meet fibre animals in the city centre, we jumped at the chance. Angora rabbits (and angora goats and angora cats) are...

You know how it is: you're looking round the web, and you find a picture of the perfect lace edging (or garden bench, or veneer effect), and only later realise that you should have noted it down. But you didn't. Oh dear. Did you know there's a place on the web where you can put all those little bits of...

For a bit of novelty for the weekend, we thought we'd pass on a family recipe. This porter cake, made with Guinness (or other stout of your choice), turns out moist and not too sweet - rather grown up, in fact. A generous slice and a cup of tea makes most days better. The fact that it's called porter cake...

A few posts ago, we talked about Valentine's Day knitting for men. But many of you are looking for romantic knitting or gifts for women too. So we thought we'd showcase a few ideas today. First of all, this romantic piece is the Poetry cape from Louisa Harding's Three Graces pattern book, made from luscious Grace Wool and Silk. A...

Conspicuous frugality is big these days. Up-cycled clothes, soothing casseroles of less popular cuts of meat, holidaying at home - the press is full of these. Yarn crafts are no exception. We're all wondering how to maintain our craft with smaller budgets. Well, we can share the secret with you - work finer. The economics of this is simple: the...

The Christmas knitting over, the mince pies eaten, we thought we'd take a deep breath and recall some of what we've been up to for the last year. There was an awful lot of it! We had visitors! In a summer and autumn stuffed with special events - one-off visits, workshops, our fifth birthday party, the yarn tasting - we...

This is just a quick post to wish you all a wonderful time over the festive season, and a very happy 2012. It's been a busy year here (and it's not over yet, not until 6.00pm this evening!). We'd like to take the chance to say thank you to all of you - without your support and feedback, This Is...

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...

With St Patrick's Day next week, it seemed a good time to look at our Irish products. We have quite a range of excellent yarn and tools that are produced here, and many of them are exclusive to This Is Knit. If you're looking for an Aran yarn, then Studio Donegal is perfect. It comes in a fantastic range of...

With an alleged average consumption of four cups a day, the Irish are apparently the world's greatest tea drinkers. We're picky about how it's made (loose or bag? china pot or metal?), about how we drink it (milk first or second? cup warmed or not?), and even if we bring tea away with us, it just tastes different abroad. There's...

May we introduce José? Dixie's sister found him on a visit to SunCrest Orchard Alpacas in Colorado and sent him over (they'll sell you a breeding complete herd, too, but we don't really have the room). Dixie decided that he might prefer to hang out with some sheep in This Is Knit, so that is where he spends most of...

St Valentine's Day is nearly here. There's hearts and flowers all over the place, and we're enjoying it wholeheartedly, so it's a good time to share some things that we love. There's a shop beside us called Article which sells beautifully designed, clever and witty things. They always have eye-catching window displays, and when we saw a string of tiny...

(Just a little intro from Lisa!... ) Roseanne is dropping in to let us know what she has been knitting lately! I've wanted to knit Paper Dolls by Kate Davies for forever! A couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet, bought the pattern on Ravelry, and rescued some beautiful purple Naturespun Fingering from my stash (an awesome yarn which...

...you take three large columns of Brown Sheep Yarn, a dash of creativity and a heavy dose of mischief? Impromptu signage!!

I'm loving this pattern.  And this yarn!! /ahem So, Rusted Root continues on.  I'm on row 41, which is 2 short of moving the sleeves to waste yarn and starting to do proper in-the-round knitting, joining under the armholes.  There's about 200 stitches on the needles right now, which takes me about 25 minutes to do one round.  That's a...

I always tell people to swatch. It's a bit of a mantra, really... And funnily enough I sometimes even take my own advice :) This time, though, This Time... I have been taking that nugget of knitterly wisdom under serious (and possibly even slightly obsessive) consideration. I spent alot of January and February swatching for my wedding shawl. The pattern...