World Wide Knit in Public Day 2017

Join the Hand Knitters Guild Victoria for another WWKIP Day on Saturday 10 June 2017 from 12 noon to 2pm, at the City Library, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. WWKiP events started in the US in 2005 and have spread worldwide with outdoor activities sprouting everywhere.

You don’t have to be a Guild member to join in – everyone is welcome! Bring along your knitting or crochet and enjoy this crafty gathering. Guild members will be available to get you started if you’re a beginner, and some needles and yarn will be provided. Library staff will make us welcome and have kindly offered to have a selection of their knitting book available for you to peruse. If you are a member of the City of Melbourne Library service you will be able to borrow them as well.

We will be meeting up with the City Library’s craft groups in the upstairs Gallery space. Join us for an opportunity to meet other knitters and have a chat while knitting in public.  If you are on Ravelry you can register your interest in joining the event. Not in Melbourne? Visit the WWKiP Day website for a listing of gatherings around the world, there is bound to be one near you.

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Are we excited?

Yes we sure are. The Guild has had a great response from yarn and craft makers wanting to have a stall at our Yarn and Craft Market coming up on Sunday 29 May at the Coburg Town Hall, from 10am-3pm. This means that there will be plenty off lovely yarn and supplies from independent makers from Victoria for you to get excited about.

Charly from Ixchel Angora Fibres and Yarns will be back this year with her beautiful soft yarns. Like many of the stall holders at our market, Charly does not have a bricks and mortar shop so this is a great opportunity to feel how soft her yarns are and to see the rainbow of colours with your own eyes. Cat and Sparrow will be returning this year with their yarns and fibre roving (pictured) for spinning. Dairing Yarns will also be back with a stall showcasing their unusual fibres, visit their website to see what I mean.

We are very excited to welcome Kelly of Miss Click Clack to the market this year with her hand dyed sock and DK yarns with great names after places in Melbourne such as the Merri Creek sock base in the DangerWillRobinson colour way. Ursula of Little Dipper yarns is returning to the market this year with her lovely hand dyed yarn, as is Julie of Dyed By Hand Yarns. Julie will have some one off OOAK skeins that were colour experiments, that she may not repeat, along with her regular array of great hand painted yarns. Lara Downs will be back with their range of mohair and merino yarns. Janet of Nanny’s Spin on Things  is returning with her art yarns.

If you are as excited as we are about this year’s market you can download this flyer and tell everyone.

Come back and visit soon as we add other stallholder information and share a bit more about what else will be happening at the Guild’s Yarn and Craft Market.

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We all love the yellow submarine

Photo from the Holbrook Yellow Submarine project managed by Murray Arts, together with Greater Hume Shire Council and the Holbrook Sheep and Wool Fair

If you have done the long drive along the Hume between Melbourne and Sydney you probably will have made a rest stop at the HMAS Otway submarine in Holbrook. The dull grey of the Holbrook sub was completely reinvented over June-July this year with an allover yarn bombing in bright yellow. The yarn bombing adventure was managed by volunteers who wanted to create a community activity and event but became the country’s largest yarn bombing project to date. The Yellow Submarine project combined an eclectic mix of events:  The Centenary of Australian Submarines 1914-2014;  International Yarn Bombing Day (7 June); the Holbrook Sheep & Wool Fair; and 50 years since the Beatles landed in Australia.

A call went out for yellow knitted squares or blankets and the response was huge, with some of the yellow squares coming all the way from Scotland. The amazing spectacle was made possible by hundreds of hours of knitting and sewing. The result was spectacular and sadly the sub was returned to it’s former greyness on 12 July. The project didn’t end there and the benefits are still being enjoyed as the knitting needles and yellow fabric are redistributed to charities.

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An Art Exhibition with Wool Content

At our July Sit and Knit Nola told us about an exhibition currently on at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen by artist Siri Hayes, that uses wool in ways you wouldn’t expect. Called Siri Hayes: Back to Nature Scene, the exhibition consists of textile works and photographs. Melbourne artist Siri Hayes is better known for her photographs but she also has a background in craft and has worked with the gardeners at Heide to procure plants to use to hand-dye her wool. One of the textile artworks is strung between persimmon trees in the garden, so it is literally a part of nature, another is a woven circular rug made using the yarn dyed with plants from the extensive gardens at Heide.

If you haven’t visited Heide this exhibition would make a great introduction to this lovely museum, and if you are really keen, there is a yarn bombing workshop happening in the morning on the 20 July with Siri Hayes at Heide. (The cost is $55. Call (03) 9850 1500 to book.) The Siri Hayes exhibition runs until the 28 July 2013.

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