I’ve been meaning to make a knitted sign for my little knitwear business for a while but, before that, I made an ‘open’ sign to hang in the door of The Woolly Brew yarn shop in Pittenweem, Fife. To fit in with the bright and pompommy look of the shop, I surrounded the sign in a rainbow frame of pompoms and echoed this in the knitted rainbow spots. I knitted the sign in Fair Isle colourwork, using the fabulous range of colours in Jamieson’s Spindrift Shetland wool. I made it double sided, with ‘back soon’ on the reverse, to cover those speedy trips to post woolly orders at the post office across the street.
Well, it's East Neuk Open Studios over the weekend just gone and the coming weekend (2/3rd July 2022) so I knitted and knitted and made myself a Woollen Wave sign to mark where I am for Open Studios, and to hang at future makers’ markets. I had planned to stick to a restrained sea-themed palette, to reflect the colours of my knitwear but then added a giddy, rainbow ‘open’ mini-sign, too. Ooh, and a sock-thing to cover the support (the support cobbled together from a discarded, bent mist-netting pole, a plant support and an old parasol base). These signs are to stand outside during popups, come wind, rain or snow, so I wet felted the pompoms into bobbles for robustness- lots of pummelling and rubbing them in alternately very hot and cold water for a good, long time. Should a passing herring gull do its worst, I can easily hand wash the signs clean again.
The main image shows the moment of final decision to pompom or not to pompom for the Woolly Brew sign- definitely pompom.