70 Vintage flowers: a giveaway

Something jolly exciting happened just the other day ... knitsofacto's follower numbers hit the fifties! And that clearly doesn't include all you lovelies following via Google reader and such! Plus page views for the last nine months topped 25,000* !! I think that calls for a celebration, don't you?

Actually, knitsofacto has been around since 2007, but for years it lay abandoned in a virtual attic gathering dust, until February, when on a whim I decided to give blogging another go. Blogtopia was much altered I found, and I wasn't sure if it still contained a knitsofacto shaped niche, heck I wasn't totally sure what shape knitsofacto was henceforth going to be. But I cleared out the old posts to make way for the new, restyled and revamped, and started afresh, follower-less and largely reader-less at first. And what a truly marvellous time I've had since, it's been a blast.

I'm not convinced I've cracked this blogging thing yet mind you. I mostly write as I speak - and yes I really do use words like jolly and discombobulated - but I can sound a bit school marmish from time to time, it's the academic in me, I can't always help myself. I'm not as funny yet as I know I can be. And I still feel very much a novice blogger. So I am humbled by your continued interest in what I do and make and write, and happy to have made so many lovely bloggy friends.

This giveaway is my thank you to everyone who has stopped by, I just wish I had a gift for each of you, a pretty primula in a little terracotta pot perhaps. Instead I have the perfect book to send to one lucky knitsofacto reader, Vic Brotherson's wonderful Vintage Flowers.I was given a copy for my birthday and I absolutely love it, so I'm really chuffed to be able to offer you the chance to own a copy too.


I was asked by a friend recently if there was anything I'd been surprised to find myself blogging about. And yes, there was: flowers! I adore them**, I always have, I just hadn't realised how tremendously important they are to me until they kept popping up here. I'm not often to be found in a florists but I always have flowers in the house. Cut from the garden, gathered from the fields and hedgerows hereabouts, forced indoors from bulbs, gifted to me by friends, or picked up for little more than pennies at local farmers markets. And I have a vast assortment of jugs, jars, bowls and bottles, old and new, that I use as vases. Which is just what Brotherson recommends: "try to keep as many different water holding vessels in your home ... as possible", she says, from "pickle jars" to "patterned milk jugs". I even have some old glass teething powder bottles!

I was hoping to have had a little booky photo shoot, to give you a taste of the contents of Vintage Flowers - blousy roses galore, hydrangea and hellebore, alchemilla and magnolia, cherry blossom, grape hyacinth - and tempt you to take part in the giveaway. But sadly the daylight here has been all but non-existent in the last few days, the skies so very grey and gloomy, and it's been quite impossible to squeeze a single decent picture out of the camera. No matter, if you scroll down here and click on 'View inside' you'll find plenty of enlargeable page views of Brotherson's book. Gorgeous isn't it, and packed with floral inspiration and useful how-tos, "tips, and old wive's tales". And see how Catherine Gratwicke's glorious photographs of the flowers are interspersed with images of vintage floral wallpapers and seed packets, and faded old paintings.

The usual pack drill then. Just leave me a comment if you'd like your name to be put in the hat, and it would be great if you'd also follow knitsofacto if you don't already, although that last bit's not essential. And for a second chance to win simply link to the giveaway on your own blog, if you have one, and then pop back and tell me that you have. Entries will close at midnight on Friday November 25th and I'll send the book anywhere in the world.


* I know stats can be deceptive, but hey, that's still a lot of page views!

** Except for lilies, I really do not like lilies.

The images top and bottom are of prints held by the Boston Public Library and do not appear in Vintage Flowers.