March's Fibre Club Letter

March's fibre club letter has arrived in my e-mail. 

The letter reads:

On the 29th of March 1869, the British Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was born.  He designed a huge number of private houses, and was a driving force in the rise of the Arts and Crafts style.  His work however was versatile, and he also designed a very large number of public buildings.  Much of central modern Dehli owes a great deal to the design skills of Lutyens.  This green space set out at the heart of the city means it is one of the only major global cities where the centre is cooler in temperature than the edges of the city.

Green space plays a key part in the design of Lutyens buildings.  One of his early commissions was for a house at Munstead Wood for the garden designer and horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll.  Jekyll was renowned for creating stunning hardy perennial flower borders, the sort that are now often seen at National Trust properties.  She is known for her bold use of colours, and wrote several books on the use of colour in gardens.  Lutyens and Jekyll went on to work together in many more commissions, whilst he designed the house, she created the gardens that allowed the house to sit in its landscape.

The garden at Munstead Wood also lead to one of the most significant of Lutyens commissions.  By the end of the First World War he'd been appointed as an architect by the Commonwealth War Graves commission to design monuments to commemorate the war dead.  Many larger war cemeteries have a stone of remembrance designed by him, and the Cenotaph in London is also his work.  In 1919, The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George asked Lutyens to design a catafalque (raised bier) as a temporary structure to act as a memorial in central London.  Lutyens suggested an alternative name, Cenotaph, meaning empty tomb.  He has first come across the term in the gardens of Munstead Wood where it was used to refer to a larger block of elm set on stone which served as a garden seat.

Words really can't do justice to the scale of the work he completed in his lifetime, so I hope you'll find time to explore the further reading links and discover more about this pair of inspiring creative people.

Your fibre this months takes its colour inspiration from a beautiful rose called Munstead Wood.  Developed by the magicians at David Austin Roses we loved this rose so much we accidentally bought it twice!  If you are ever in Shropshire a visit to their show gardens in June and July is thoroughly recommended, a little piece of paradise on earth.

I'm certainly intrigued by this one as I love David Austin roses but at the same time I am a little apprehensive as roses come in a range of colours, including pink, so I am hoping that if we have pink again that its a very delicate shade of pink like the David Austin rose in my garden called Spirit of Freedom.

From the spoilers chat she has revealed that it is a blend with linen and bamboo so this yarn will drape and have very little memory and best for lace and not for ribbing and will work best when spun finely.