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Printable Knitting Calendar

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PRINTABLE PDF CALENDAR – £3.00 (approx. $5)

(also available for purchase on Etsy)

Colourwork inspiration every month… forever. Sound good? This is a PDF calendar which you can print out again and again, for yourself or as gifts. Each page has a colourwork panel that you can colour in however you like. I’m not exaggerating when I say the possibilities are endless!

knitting calendar

You can then use your designs in your knitting. Setting the motifs into mittens, hats or scarves is particularly easy and I’ll have a post up later this week that shows you how.

colourwork chart calendar
I’ve crammed as many different motifs in as possible, so you can use them in your knits in many different combinations. There’s a range of modern (skulls, owls, etc.) and traditional (scandinavian, shetland, andean and anatolian) designs, and if you include the front and back covers, there are 14 panels in total.

Things I ♥

  • Colouring in! I’d forgotten how much fun it is. And these little Bic pencils are the cutest.
  • No need to worry about “messing up”. Just print out another copy.
  • Checkboxes! Each day has a corresponding checkbox so you can mark off days, or record streaks. For example, aim to knit every day for a month!
  • When the month is over, you can cut out & stick your design in your knitting notebook.

printable knitting calendar

What to Do

Once you download your PDF, you’ll need to open it in Adobe Reader (or Preview on a Mac) and print whichever pages you’d like. Then you simply cut along the lines. If you’d like to punch a hole in the top to hang it, just don’t cut along the top and you should have plenty of room. A paper guillotine would help, but I just used scissors. You can peg your calendar page to a ribbon, tack it to a corkboard, or attach it to your fridge with a magnet. :)

printable perpetual calendar
printable calendar

Bonus

Your PDF also includes 2 printable To-Do List Cards with dates, checkboxes, and, of course, designs that you can colour in.

win!

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ll be picking two random members of the Laylock Designs Group to win a free calendar every week until the end of the year. I’ll announce the winners on this thread, so I don’t need to blog about it every time. The first winner, as determined by random.org and the Ravelry member list is…

calendargiveaway1
#14 – carrotmusic!
Congratulations! :)

Have a wonderful week (& month) everyone!


Knitting & Marriage

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After my last post, here is something a little more light-hearted. However, I must offer a WARNING…

This post may cause some knitters to blush. Be brave, dear knitter, and remember that knitting is a versatile craft with a long and impressive history. Also, believe me when I tell you that this is far easier on the eyes than googling “knit pouch” in an attempt to find inspiration for your latest pattern

Traditional Norwegian knitting may bring to mind beautiful stranded colourwork jumpers with flower clocks and reindeers, but my scholarly friend Joachim has unearthed another Norwegian knitting tradition, which you won’t find in any Interweave Knitting Traditions issues (even the digital editions)… This excellent gentleman spent a whole Sunday of his life researching Norwegian willy-warmers or forhyse & I think you will agree that deserves not a little thanks! If you are so inclined to test the commitment of your beloved, you will find several patterns on Ravelry. Without futher ado, here’s what Joachim was able to garner about this fascinating knitting tradition:

I’ve been doing some googling regarding the willy-warmer we talked about, or suspensorium, which I now know is the technical term. What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It turned out to be a lot harder to find info on it than I thought, especially because I wasn’t sure what the original Norwegian term for it would be. After a while I found an online article in a (very local) newspaper about an old woman in the Eidskog district who sells willy-warmers, and who claims that they are an old Norwegian tradition. A lot of the commentators contested her claim, but some of them mentioned having heard of such warmers being used as far back as the 1700s, going under the name “forhyse.” So I searched “forhyse” and came up with these knitted specimens from the Norwegian ethnographic folk museum, from the Hordaland and Osterøy districts.

It doesn’t say when they were made. Apparently “vænakot” or “venakot” is an alternative Norwegian name for them. “Ven/væn” means “pretty,” and “kot” and “hyse” both mean “little house.”

I also found references on Google Books. This one, about wedding traditions on the Faeroe Islands, refers to them as “kallvøttur” or “purrivøttur.”. It says that “kall” means “man,” and “purra” means testicles. “Vøttur” is the equivalent of the Norwegian “vott,” mitten. It was supposed to be knitted from the softest headwool. The book also claims that in Norway, the forhyse would sometimes be made out of squirrel fur, with the furry part inwards. Men would wear it when they went out in their leather trousers during the winter. It also mentions an ethnographic interview from Nordhordaland in Norway with a woman who was born in 1884. The reference is in this journal, published by the Norwegian folk museum in 1960. In the snippet that Google Books allows me to read, the woman reports having seen the “forhyse.” She says, “The forhyse looked like a mitten without the thumb. It was tied around the waist with a spun woolen thread. The forhyse itself was made out of white homespun.” It confirms what I was told about the tradition growing up: That it was common for a girl to give a forhyse to the man she was involved with as a test of commitment. If he accepted it, she knew he was serious about their relationship; if he laughed it off, he wasn’t in it for the long haul. In the anecdote on page 71, the girl’s mother had told her it was time to give her boyfriend a forhyse to test his commitment.

This stuff is all very fascinating. The book about Faroese wedding traditions goes on to discuss a viking tradition referred to as “sheath proposal,” where a woman would pass around an empty knife sheath, and would marry the man who returned it with a knife that fit the sheath. Talk about being obvious. Maybe the forhyse tradition is the next logical step of the viking tradition?

24th March, 2011  // Traditional Knitting // tags: , , .

The Story of the Turkish Slippers

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Turkish Slippers

These types of knitted slippers – called ‘çetik’ (cheh-teek) – are quite common in Turkish villages. Most village women produce such handiwork to supplement the household income. They are gorgeous, comfortable, and made by very skilled hands, and the next time you’re in Turkey, I hope you make it a priority to purchase at least one pair. I’ve been given a few pairs over the years, often brought by friends and acquaintances from their own villages, but this pair I’d like to share with you is particularly special to me.

They were given to me by my hostess on a school trip to a village just outside Ankara. Our aim was to fulfil the ‘service’ requirements of our IB curriculum; we were to play games and teach the children, deliver our old computers to them, and paint a pretty mural in their dining hall. Our work took us two days, and several families in the village put us up for one night. Although we were the ones bestowing the supposed “charity,” it was the generosity of our hostess that really touched me. She laid on lavish meals for my friend and I, seated on the floor with the traditional large, round tray. Their house seemed very spacious to me. Everyone I knew lived in the city, in flats that were crammed with furniture. Their timber house had a barn downstairs, and stone steps that led down to a courtyard where chickens wandered about. One of the children brought in a kid, which ran up and down the hall baa-ing for its mother. On the other side of the house was a small garden with mulberry trees and a vegetable patch. Further on were the barns that housed their cows. The village smelt rather pungently of animals and manure, and you had to watch your step as you walked along the narrow streets, and give way to herds of goats (and goatherds). On the way to school in the morning the children picked daisies and poppies and pistachios.

strawberries

It looked almost idyllic to me, and yet our hostess was very apologetic and humble. She said things must be so much nicer and cleaner in the city, she was sorry they couldn’t do better. She brought out two large bags, one with knitted slippers, and one with headscarves with edges worked in delicate needle lace. I chose this pair of slippers, and a lovely dark red headscarf. I thought the bold, beautiful strawberry motif was unusual, not like the traditional, abstract motifs of Turkish socks. I imagined my hostess deciding to knit something a little different one day, sitting on the divan, alone in the living room while the children were at school and her husband asleep (he worked night shifts at the mine), crossing her legs in the shalvar she wore, and expertly choosing the colours. The black shows off the red and green to perfection. The knitting is tight, so that the slipper is hard-wearing, and the strawberries which appear upside down when the slippers are laid flat, smile up at me the right way round when I wear them. I don’t wear them too often though, because they’re so special.

strawberry

They remind me of the strawberries my Granddad grows. When I was little and we visited England every other summer, my Granddad would present me with the first big, ripe, juicy, sweet, bright red strawberry of the season, and I would eat it with my Weetabix (another treat we couldn’t get in Turkey) for breakfast. They remind me of the cold winters of Turkey, and the warm red glow of the summers. They remind me of Morris’s ‘Strawberry Thief‘, and of the strawberries ripening outside the cottage right now, in Wales. But most of all, I suppose, they remind me of the generosity of this knitter. I hope she doesn’t consider herself poor for living in a village rather than a city. I hope she realises that she’s an artist, and knows that I treasure these slippers she spent hours working on. I know they must have been hard to part with.

15th May, 2009  // Life, Traditional Knitting // tags: , , , .

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