Birthday Parties # 2

We were at another children's party this weekend (they always seem to come along in pairs dont they?) to celebrate the birthday of one of the bean's nursery friends, Macey. There were balloons and dancing and face painting, and we came home with one of these boy tigers.

While we were there I met Kerry Kimber, who runs Kids Knit. She was telling us about the tights (yes, tights!) she'd been knitting for Di Gilpin and a catwalk show happening today in London. Di has designed a collection of knitted pieces including socks, stockings, tights and a skirt with 4m of knitted fabric - all of which have been hand knitted. Kerry made one pair of tights, which took around 70 hours to complete. It sounds interesting and fun as a one-off, but not a way to make any money - although DH was quite keen on the idea of me knitting for money...

Examples like this demonstrate the great difficulty that UK hand-knitters have in making a sensible living from knitting pieces for sale, and the very great price that such items would need to retail at to provide such knitters with the minimum wage. Maybe if we shifted our taxation and economic system to favour labour-intensive processes and products over carbon-intensive processes and products then this might change a bit. But £700 (or more) for a pair of tights is still a hell of a lot...