Ginger Knits UK

I was planning to knit my way through the General Election coverage last night but my friend Emma made election themed vodka jellies which would have made knitting dangerous. We ate them as the first few results came in (after drinking caipirinhas and boozy ginger beer) as well as playing the games in the BBC election party pack. The best one was bingo which involved spotting classic BBC election phrases such as "not since 1974", "technical difficulties" and "bellwether" (only one of us knew what that meant and it wasn't me). The jellies were strawberry Labour red, Lib Dem pineapple yellow and lime for the Greens and Independents. The Tory blue jellies were made with food colouring and were vile. Enough said. Myself and Emma had printed out the leader masks but we didn't wear them due to a lack of elastic (I wasn't giving up valuable yarn for that) but I did get a shot of Gordon Brown on the underground. Today has been a little fuzzy around the

The website http://www.thestraightchoice.org/ catalogues election leaflets and highlights untruths in them such as skewed graphs and imitating ballot papers (which is illegal but all the main parties do it - madness). I'm showing you it because if you click on the main image of the three party leaders you can see it's made of campaign leaflets. I like it. That is all.

I was settling down to read through the three main party manifestos for the general election on Thursday but got distracted by the cartoon granny on the Labour party website. For political balance here are the links to the other key parties. I'll update this if I find any other knitting references. Liberal Democrats The Green Party Conservatives UKIP I'm not linking to the BNP but to the Hope not Hate Campaign website.

My work has been published in a knitting magazine. It's not a knitting pattern but an article about the p/hop fundraiser for Medecins Sans Frontieres . It's in the latest edition of Yarn Forward magazine (Issue 25, June 2010) and is a whopping 4 page spread. Those socks sneaking into shot are a fab p/hop pattern called Socks Without Borders . I'm knitting a sample for p/hop when we visit knitting festivals over the summer. More on those later...

Well here it is, you saw it here first, the knitted tie for a Channel 4 newsreader! Although this was very easy to knit I've leant a bit from making it and consider it a prototype. I made it in garter stitch alternating a solid pink sock yarn and a Crazy Zauberball in fuscia colour way. While the colours changed they way I had planned the edges are a tad untidy for my liking despite carefully twisting the yarns up one edge and the tie itself is very stretchy. Alex my patient and understanding other half tied it in a Windosr knot as a normal tie knot didn't work due to the stretchiness of the fabric. The tail of the tie is overlong so I may do some tinkering with it before dropping it off at the Channel4 office tomorrow. I think I'll knit another tie and make a few small changes before writing it up as a pattern. I'll use just one yarn to get rid of the untidy edge, make it shorter to allow for stretching and slip stich the edges. Apart from that it was fun to make. I&#

I have to declare that I am finding the UK 2010 Elections highly entertaining, mainly due to the influence and pithy banter found on social networking sites such as twitter. I wish I'd thought of a blog-a-long for it as it's as entertaining as the Olympics, what with live leaders debates, microphone gaffs and homophobic Tories. Oh wait, that last one isn't entertaining, just down right scary. Back to knitting, one twitter knitter friend pointed out that the BBC 2010 Election logo looks like knitting needles. What do you think? As well as being entertained by fellow knitters and comedians on twitter I've also picked up a knitting assignment. @theyarnyard Natalie, founder of p/hop , got chatting on twitter to Jon Snow, Channel 4 newsreader about knitting him socks as he wears some great brightly coloured socks which can often be seen on the news. I follow another Channel 4 journalist, Krishnan Guru Murthy @krishgm and didn't want him to be left out of the sock fest