Free extreme knitting 16th June with Rachel Ellis of Cutlet Country Crafts

Everyone is welcome to join in this event.  Great fun for all the family!

Free extreme knitting and peg looming workshop by Rachel Ellis of Cutlet Country Crafts

10am - 4pm

We will supply everything you need, just book & turn up, there will be lots of cake, coffee & great conversation available all day

Rachel Ellis Contact Details
www.cutletcountrycrafts.weebly.com
Twitter – @cutletcountrycr
facebook – www.facebook.com/cutletcountrycrafts
email – cutletcountrycrafts@hotmail.co.uk

What Rachel has to say about how she learnt her skills
I am inspired by crafting as a child I would sit for hours with my grandma making things. This has continued all through my life a lot of it was for practical reasons making clothes and furnishing for the home and children.

Recently I have started to share these crafts to allow others to be able to make things that they thought they could never do. As the price of things go up in the retail stores it seems more and more people are wanting to be a little more self sufficient and be able to make things for themselves the home or for gifts to friends and family.

I do classes and day courses in Peglooming, extreme knitting, sewing, jewellery making, nuno felting and card making.

As I do a wide range of crafts I never get bored of crafting and I’m always looking for new ways or techniques to expand on the crafts I do.

Cutlet Country Crafts came about when I lost my job at a large IT company and I had to start and sell my items to make ends meet and try to avoid loosing our smallholding and animals. It has been slowly picking up pace but is still in the early days and I have been learning a lot about promoting.

Extreme Knitting
I remember watching the women of my family knitting when I was young and I had my small set of needles and just managed squares which later grandma would make into blankets, I always wanted to knit something like the rest of my family but never managed until I was an adult myself. I found it very hard to follow complex patterns as I suffer from dyslexia and they just didn’t make sense, so I would cast on and knit away testing and trying different ways until eventually I had made something. This made me curious and I had read an article about large needles and clothing that was popular in the sixties so I managed to get some large needles and lots of balls of yarn and started playing with different stitches and number of yarns. I found it very addictive as the yarns paint colours through the item that you really can’t replicate. The items are thick and warm and very practical especially in the colder months even just a lap blanket to pop over you whilst watching tv means that we can keep the heating off longer or at least turned down to save on those ever increasing bills.
I now write simple patterns so that people can do something nice to wear or use at entry level or take the pattern as a template and use any stitches they want. My kits give the beginner the confidence and ability to start a very simple style of knitting that can lead to hours of fun and results much faster than traditional knitting.