Alexandra Palace is a lovely building, and traveling up to it on the free bus gives you a great view across London. I meant to take a photo of the outside but I forgot, however, it looks good on the inside too.
The first thing we saw when we came in the entrance was a pergola absolutely covered in knitted flowers, butterflies and birds. It had been created for Livability, a charity that supports people with various disabilities, and it looked amazing. Here are some of my favourite parts - I especially liked the blue tit hanging on the peanuts.
The show consists of three large halls of exhibitors, with a mix of stands with items for sale, and artworks created using a variety of the crafts that were on show - knitting, crochet, felting, embroidery and sewing. We headed into the largest hall, which boasts a lovely stained glass window, as well as an incredible number of stands filled, amongst other things, with all sorts of lovely yarn!
We were particularly taken by the Stylecraft stand, where the lovely Lucy from Attic 24
was showing off her gorgeous colourful blankets, made with Stylecraft Special DK. They now have packs with all the colours you need to make a particular blanket, and they were doing a roaring trade - it seemed like every other person there was carrying a big pack of yarn away with them!
I've bought Stylecraft acrylic yarn before but I haven't found it so good for amigurumi - it's a bit thin compared to other yarns I use - but it does have a very nice feel, and it's perfect to make blankets that are soft and comfortable, but still good for everyday use. However, I used their Alpaca DK to make my Alpaca Family and found it worked really well for amigurumi, with a nice texture. Since I'm working on some more animal amigurumi I couldn't resist buying a selection of colours, and some of the new Alpaca Tweed DK.
After a bit of lunch we moved onto the other rooms, which had some amazing creations in them, such as these felted skulls and organic shapes (the first two photos are items by Stephanie Metz, I didn't get the details for the others), sculptural crocheted clothes and a life-size knitted bear sculpture.
Given that I'm a massive Tolkien fan, I think my favourite creations were by Denise Salway, The Knitting Witch. She has made the most amazing knitted Hobbit coat, with Smaug flying over the Lonely Mountain and all sorts of details, like a little Gollum peering through the stitches. It has a lovely selection of different textures, and is apparently quite wearable. She has also made lots of characters from the story, including Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, Galadriel, Smaug, and Peter Jackson filming them all!
Denise Salway with her creations.
All in all we had a great day, even if we were exhausted by the end. I'm looking forward to next year now!
