World Wide Knit in Public Day

To celebrate this, Rowan at John Lewis were hosting an event, and I thought I would go along and check it out! This is the first time I've ever been to a knitting group, or even knitted with other people. I'm not a socail knitter...

They had decided to put together a goody bag for everyone who came to the store to knit that day with a load of free patterns, a 10% discount voucher on Rowan items, as well as a Rowan bag, sticker, and label to sew into your knitted items, which was a really nice thing to get.

They'd stolen a load of comfy chairs and sofas from the furniture department, and put them in the knitting section along with our own sign announcing world wide knit in public day. I didn't manage to get a picture of everyone knitting, but hopefully someone should email one to me.

We had a couple of silly competitions, one for fastest knitter and one for knitted bunting. I took my sock along to finish, but spent the entire day working on my piece of bunting. They even gave us Rowan yarn and needles to knit with!

My beautiful piece of bunting! It's just moss stitch and stockinette stitch stripes, and then I picked up and knitted a border, because my edges were a mess.

This is all the bunting we managed to finish, and there were a couple of unfinished pieces as well. It's going to be strung up together and hung up at the next John Lewis knitting coffee morning. You can see the prizes in the background, and I didn't win either competition (but I did find out I can knit 107 stitches in 3 minutes if I try!) but I had a really lovely day. The winner was not surprisingly the amazing string of WWKIP day bunting you can see at the back in blue and yellow. It even had embroidered balls of wool with needles in them, as well as WWKIP embroidery!

We had the designer Sarah Hatton with us for the day, and we got a sneek peek (and by that I mean knitted up items) at her new designs for the next Rowan magazine. In fact, there is a picture of the group knitting at her blog here. I also got to see everybody's beautiful hand knit items, and it's spurred me on to try and finish my Central Park Hoodie, so I can actually wear something I've knitted.

Of course, I couldn't let that 10% voucher go to waste...

The book is Sarah Hatton's, and she was kind enough to sign it for me, and the yarn is Rowan siena. I just can't get the beautiful blue colour of the yarn to come out, so you will have to take my word for it that it is lovely.

What has everybody else been doing for WWKIP day?