From the purple dyeshed...

What a lovely few days in Glasgow. As I travelled north on the bus yesterday, I had time to review and mull over the 3 days of the conference, along with all I'd seen and experienced in Glasgow - a city I really do not know well enough.

While I didn't get to hear all the speakers, as I also had a stand in the market place which needed attention, those I did hear were interesting and thought provoking.  I can't pretend I agreed with, or even understood, all of the papers presented, but I cannot deny that it forced me to think about aspects of knitting I'd never considered before.



It was a full programme, at the heart of which were the core themes of Authenticity, Sustainability and Creativity.  As you can imagine, discussion between delegates spilled out from the conference room into the tea breaks and market place, and it was interesting to hear snippets of conversations taking place.  Something that cropped up again and again in discussions that I heard was the subject of the level of payment made to knitters working for British companies who retailed hand knitted garments or who produced hand knitted garments for fashion houses.  On the subject of authenticity, Linda Newington presented an interesting, albeit inconclusive, paper on authenticity and heritage - based around her recent visit to Fair Isle where she was able to interview and interact with Fair Isle knitters.  The authenticity theme was continued on the second day in Ruth Gilbert's paper "Whose tradition is it anyway? Authenticity and appropriation in the internet age".  It was Gilbert who made the point that "Tradition cannot be preserved, only recreated" leaving a question mark in my mind as to where that left us when it came to "copying", or should that be "recreating" what have become known as traditional designs.  She was also clear that if a certain stitch pattern can be attributed to a particular designer then it cannot be considered as "traditional".

We were invited to a Civic Reception at Glasgow's City Chambers - a building filled with stunning tile work in the ceiling arches.



It was really difficult to photograph the tile work, and I hadn't taken my long lens to Glasgow, but you can take my word for it - or better still, if you're in Glasgow, go and have a look!  Just remember to look up.  The hall where we had the reception was a little too ornate for my taste (I don't think there was much left to cover in gilt), but the windows were extremely eye catching, and I couldn't help but think the patterns would make a great knitting pattern:



The staircase was certainly impressive:



and the Glasgow Coat of Arms laid in tiles at the front door caught my eye, although I had to go and look up the meaning behind the motto and the reason for the fish, tree, bird and bell.



On the second day one of the highlights for me was the paper presented by Kari Steihaug.  She is an artist and a poet, and it was her work in archiving unfinished knitted items which captured my imagination.  She has produced a book - Archive, the Unfinished Ones - with photographs of  the items, along with the story behind why the item is unfinished.

We had a fabulous conference dinner at Oran Mor where I had the good fortune to be sharing a table with Helen Robertson, Hazel Tindell, Pat Blain, Tania Ashton Jones, aka TJFrog, and Marilyn.  Hazel had stunned me earlier in the day by wearing a beautiful jacket which she'd knitted in my yarn, and of course I forgot to photograph it!  But you can read all about her project and see photographs on her blog here.  Tania has used my yarn in many of her dorset buttons, and they were certainly proving popular in the market place at the conference.  Helen makes stunning jewellery, and my one regret of the conference was I missed her paper which received resounding approval and appreciation from those who heard her.

Pat deserves a paragraph all of her own!    It was Pat who persuaded me to go to the conference, and who organised somewhere for me to stay.  She made sure I got to everywhere I needed to be, and even persuaded me on to the Glasgow Underground - I have the ticket to prove it.   It was delightful to spend time with her, and a special thank you to her daughter, Frances, who put us up for the few nights (or should that be "put up with us"), and fed us the most delicious meal on our final evening in Glasgow.  Thank you Pat.

There were so many highlights, but all things have to end, and the conference closed on Friday afternoon with a fashion show highlighting the designs of various Scottish based designers.  I would point you in the direction of Kate Davies' blog to see lovely photographs of this particular event.  It would also be remiss of me not to mention the inspirational paper from Tom van Deijnen on the final day - "Old Techniques and New Cardigans : a case study in traditional knit repair techniques", although by the time Tom's presentation was due he was rather nervous to use the term "traditional" given all the discussion which had gone before.   I could have listened to Tom for much, much longer.  The phrase from his talk that I will take away with me though was "Wear a beautifully mended garment as a badge of honour" - we need to resist the throw away attitudes to prevalent today.

I know that discussion about some of the points raised will continue for some time to come.  But I was awfully touched when Linda Newington asked if I could be persuaded to attend the next In the Loop 5 conference in Winchester in 2017.  Congratulations to all the organisers and co-ordinators of this event.  You did a fabulous job.