Kate Davies

Apologies about the delay to your Sunday newsletter: following a severe storm this weekend, we are currently dealing with a power outage in South Kintyre, and I’m posting this from the library in Campbeltown.

Good morning!

Good morning, and welcome to your Rip it Up (and Start Again) Sunday newsletter.

Thank you for all of your jukebox suggestions!

Hello!

Wow!

Hello!

Although my dad did not take photography particularly “seriously” and would never regard his images as constituting, in any sense, an “archive”, the photographs and slides I have been scanning certainly reveal a lot about him and his character.

One of the things I’ve found comforting in these sad days has been scanning and organising my Dad’s old slides and photographs.

My lovely dad, Wal Davies, died on August 12th, aged 89.

Many Yorlin knitters have completed the bodies of their cardigans, knitted both the sleeves, and are now approaching the garment’s finishing lines – aka its button bands.

Good morning, people, it’s your happy-go-lucky labrador-friend BOB here.

How are you Yorlin knitters getting along?

Some more rose poetry for you today.

In spring and summer, the lanes and field margins of South Kintyre are awash with flowers: primroses and bluebells, cow parsley and campion.

Perhaps for no poet did the rose serve as a more powerful motif than Rainer Maria Rilke.

We inherited several roses in the mill garden and, never having grown them before, I’ve been trying to identify and learn about roses and their needs.

I really enjoyed the discussion of yesterday’s rose / pink post.

It is rose season here in the mill garden, and I have the colour of roses on my mind.

I find our responses to colour endlessly fascinating.

Those of you who enjoyed seeing the emergence of my Himalayan blue poppy in 2025 may be interested to know how it has fared this year.

We have one final lovely Yorlin to show you today.

Over the past few months, behind the scenes, the KDD team has been busy with Yorlin knitting.

Good morning, we have another lovely Yorlin, in a rather different hue, to inspire you today.

Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me.

Good morning!

Good morning, and welcome back to the mill garden!

Good morning!

It’s time to announce the KDD summer KAL!

I am currently reading Anne Goldgar’s excellent Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), a book which is perhaps less about tulips themselves than about what they represented in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic.

As I was looking for images of “broken” tulips in historic collections the other day, I happened across a series of watercolour studies in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which were the work of Mary Moser.

“Come quickly,” I said to Tom, “and bring the camera.

My theme today is Knitting Bullshit and before I begin, I had better explain to you what I understand bullshit to be.

The book is out, all pre-ordered copies have been shipped (thank you, Kate C and Kendall) and club members can access the full e-book in your Ravelry libraries.

Tulip season has arrived – hurrah!

We are anticipating the publication of Knitting Wester Ross today, and the team is ready (and waiting) in the KDD warehouse to begin the process of shipping the book out to club members, before putting it on general sale.

Hello!

It’s time to reveal the final pattern from Knitting Wester Ross: I’m still sad that I was ill at the point in the schedule when this particular design landed, but it’s better late than never.

The clocks have gone forward and we have made it through the winter (feeble yay).

Following on from yesterday’s missive about my Òran Eile / Another Song design, here’s a pattern closely related to it: Brèid: Brèid (pronounced like beige, with a rolled ‘r’ in it) is a Scottish Gaelic word for a kerchief.

Good news this morning: our work is done and the Wester Ross book is away to the printers in Glasgow, which means we should be able to publish it around the middle of next month.

Warning: this missive contains more helle-boring content!

One of the things I love about gardening is the experience it enables of what Buddhists refer to as Beginner’s Mind: I am very much a beginner gardener, and the fact that I inherited my garden means that, over the past two years, I’ve often found myself in

Hello!

our brand new yarn!

Hello all, it’s Tom here and I’m writing to let you know that Kate is very unwell at the moment.

a playful experiment with scale and proportion

what we need more of this January