Lucy Hague blog — Lucy Hague

If (like me) you spend unhealthy amounts of time on Ravelry, you may just have heard some murmurings of a special project organised by a group of indie designers - well, it's time to go public... the Gift-a-long has begun! The Gift-a-long is a collaborative event, hosted and organised by over a hundred independent designers on Ravelry. We've banded together to offer a huge selection of our patterns at a 25% discount, and the Ravelry group will host KAL/CAL threads in different categories, so that you can chat along with fellow Ravelry members whilst you get your gift-knitting/crocheting underway. Best of all, there's a massive selection of prizes on offer, which will be awarded randomly to participants in each of the threads - if you take part in the Shawls & Stoles category, you will be in with a chance to win a subscription to my Celtic Cable Shawls e-book - I've donated 2 pre-orders to the prize pile.

As we designers banded together to plan the Gift-a-long, we realised that there was no way to tag participating patterns in a way that would show up on the Ravelry search engine. There is a long thread in the Gift-a-long group, with one post from each designer who is taking part, but we were lacking a way to actually browse through every single pattern available. I tentatively suggested the idea of making Pinterest boards for each of the categories. Amazingly, a group of designers jumped in to help, and soon we had a team of pinners, supervised by the amazing Ash Kearns, who did a fantastic job of organising us. Between us, we pinned over 2000 patterns into categorised boards, in just a few days. And here they are!:

Hats and Head Things

Scarves and Cowls

Mitts and Other Arm Things

So, to recap, every single pattern on the boards above is available with a 25% discount, from Nov 1st to Nov 15th, when you add to Ravelry cart and use the code giftalong. And, you can join a KAL/CAL in the Gift-a-long group and be in with a chance to win some prizes. Hope to see you over there!

P.S. Almost forgot to mention... it probably goes without saying, but every individual pattern in my Ravelry store is in the Gift-a-long, and eligible for the discount. If you've bought a pattern from me previously and not cast-on yet, you can still take part in the KAL threads!

Due to my apparent complete lack of ability to keep this blog updated regularly, I've decided to take some inspiration from the wonderful world of Havi Brooks, of The Fluent Self. She has a couple of weekly blog rituals, and I thought it might be fun to do something similar here. When I'm designing, I tend to work stuff out visually, pencil and paper and graphs, and as a result, I have lots and lots of design notebooks filled with drawings, charts, calculations, etc. I am by no means any kind of artist, I like to draw out my ideas, but they are definitely scribbles rather than sketches. I always find it fascinating to see other designers' notebooks, so henceforth, every Wednesday I shall show you a page or two of my own. It may not always be pretty but I hope it may at least be an entertaining little peek into my designing process. :)

This page shows me working out the Celtic knotwork panel for Nennir (which was published in Knitty Winter 2012 - probably the most exciting thing to happen to me in quite some time!). You can see that I played with a few different variations of the shape of the knot before deciding on one that I liked best. The pencil sketch in the top left corner shows how I've constructed the knotwork - this is a technique I learnt from the writings of George Bain and Aidan Meehan. This is how I usually work when designing Celtic cables - I play around until I've drawn a cable I like, then I look long and hard at it and figure how to translate it into knitted cables. Usually I pick a spot in the centre of the knot and work outwards symmetrically. Maybe one day I'll do a series of posts on my techniques of translating drawn Celtic knots to knitted Celtic knots, but it's a complex process, so I shall stop there for now!

If any other designers would like to share some pages from their notebooks, I'd love to see them! :)