Friends, Fibre and Fun

Well we have been very busy doing lots of stuff and as usual I have been soooo busy doing it that:

1. I haven’t taken pictures of most of it; and
   
2. I haven’t got round to telling you all about it yet!

So what have I been up to?
Well first off we have some sad news. Miranda got sick, just like her sisters did. She became very quiet and just stopped being happy and perky and got all puffed up under her chest. We took her to the vet thinking the worst; the vet was very kind and said that there was nothing that could be done to make her better so we let the vet put her to sleep.

Obviously this meant that Amy was all on her own and we couldn’t have that so yesterday we went back to where we got Amy from last year and got Rebecca. She is a Rhode Rock which is a hybrid cross of a Rhode Island Red and a Barred Plymouth Rock (I think). She’s a bit shy still but is quite friendly when meal worms are in the offing.

Happily Amy seems to be ok with the whole “new friend” thing and really hasn’t made too much of a fuss. She has been a bit vocal but hasn’t been pecking or chasing Rebecca so fingers crossed that all will continue to be well.

In spinning and fibery news, well quite a bit has been happening.
I am now the new Treasurer of the Somerset Guild of Spinners, Weavers & Dyers ( I get a proper metal badge) and we are having our annual fleece fair on Saturday the 18th of June. However, I probably won’t be able to make it as I am having my three wisdom teeth out and will be sedated for the procedure. This means that I will not be allowed to drive for 48 hours afterwards and as the procedure is on the Thursday afternoon I won’t be able to drive until Saturday afternoon……so I won’t be able to go – pants!

Wisdom teeth aside (and frankly I am not looking forwards to it one little bit!) my friend Liz and I have been rather busy with the spinning. We had a spinning afternoon together which was really cool. We both managed to score a bunch of free fleece on freecycle so we have done a bit of swapping between us.


We spun this – Liz did the brown, which is Zwartbles (fab word!) and the white/grey is the Romney that I’ve been working on (since forever).


Ah, what a cute puppy dog.


Liz and I also did a spinning gig at the Bath & West Show for which we managed to get free tickets for the Saturday in exchange for us sitting at the Somerset Life Magazine stand and spinning for a few hours. The weather was lovely all day; sunny with a bit of a breeze. We had a few weird questions from the public and met a few interesting textile people. We also checked out the food halls (yummy coffee and super ice-cream) and the sheep (cute Shetlands and North Ronaldsays) and watch a crazy man on the top of a very tall thin pole do a balancing act with NO safety harness!

Another Fibery Friend and our Knit Club Organiser, Lesley, organised a bit of a workshop afternoon at her mums house. There’s more space there as her mum has a conservatory and Lesley left the kiddie winks at home so it was just us grownups and a load of tea and yummy cake! We did Navajo plying and dyeing which proved to be a right laugh. Kim and Megan did a double act with their Navajo plying.


While Lesley and I did some dyeing. Here’s Lesley dyeing some of her hand spun yarn.

We steamed it in her mums electric steamer.

So, that’s it really. I’m hoping that I’ll be back to update the blog before we all go to Woolfest but if not then there will be a big update of Woolfestiness! We are going up on the Thursday and staying over until the Sunday, not long to go now!

Excited (10,00000000)

Easter Hols

Well I hope you all had a good Easter and enjoyed the Royal Wedding last Friday. I’ve been busy in the garden and I also finished spindling the first of the Romney fleece.

The fleece first:
After I finished spindle spinning the two spindles of Romney I plied them together into a two ply yarn on the larger of the two Kevin Rhodes spindles that I recently bought from a fellow Raveler. As there was some singles left over on the smaller Kevin Rhodes spindle I had a go at Navajo plying and it worked out really well, actually it was easier than doing the two ply as the singles were easier to control. When I’d been doing the two ply I got in a bit of a tangle with the singles as they came up from my box Kate (made from a cardboard box, drinking straws and knitting needles). DH got roped in as my tensioning device but I will need to think about rigging something up with elastic bands for future plying efforts as there is only so much tension the poor man can cope with! luckily it was only a small amount of yarn; or I could just cheat and use my wheel, but where’s the fun in that?

Here are the results; the ball on the left is the two singles plied together while the ball on the right is the Navajo plied yarn.





The ball at the back of the Jacob that I spun long draw at Guild in January.
Here’s a better pic of the Jacob.


All the yarns have come out quite soft and squidgy so carding and rolags are definitely cool :-) I haven't weighed it so I’m not sure how much each ball weighs.

On the gardening front, it’s been so sunny and with no rain for ages I’ve been able to get lots and lots of gardening done.


I’ve cleared all the weeds (well most of them) which included the meanest nettles in the known universe; for those I wore DHs biker gloves which are made of leather and have Kevlar in them. Kevlar is the material that bullet proof vests are made of!!

I managed to get forty petunias for six pounds – bargain! I filled all my pots and tubs with them. They are really small at the moment but they should fill out and grow pretty quickly as long as Amy stops eating them!! naughty chicken!

I’ve planted tomato seeds and courgette seeds in little pots and put them on our bedroom window sill to germinate and I’ve planted French beans and runner beans out in the garden by the front wall. I emptied the compost bins out onto the bean plot first and then left Miranda and Amy to spread the compost about, which they obligingly did.


DH also mowed the lawn so that everything is neat and tidy.

I also sanded the round garden table and oiled it with Danish oil. Now I just need to find a beach umbrella for it and it will be all sorted for a summer of tea and cake in the garden with a spot of knitting.

We have our first crop from the garden already – rhubarb. The rhubarb plant is really pumping out loads of stalks this year and we have become completely hooked on Greek yoghurt and rhubarb; it’s yummy, yum, yum.

I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of our pretty flowers and our river.

More mittens! and some yoghurt eating hens

Hello:-)

Since the last post I've been busy knitting more mittens.....but I haven't got much to show for it I'm afraid just this little bit of a mitt here

I'll explain; basically I've been knitting loads and then pulling it all out 'cos it's not working properly....grrrr!. I tried my Liz Inspired Mitts with some Noro Silk Garden which although lovely and colourful is a total pain in the bum when it comes to knots resulting in sudden colour changes and also the thick and thin nature of the yarn. After several attempts it just wasn't wanting to be those mitts so I tried Elizabeth Zimmerman's Mystery Mittens from her book Knitting Around several attempts resulted in a very large thumb and a too short hand and a very frustrated knitter...mmmm.

But not to worry:-) I've borrowed some books from Spinning Guild one being the EZ book Knitting Around and another being this one

The book basically gives a recipe for knitting a mitten and then you apply the cuff and colourwork pattern that you fancy. It gives an idea of how many stitches to cast on for the cuff and how many you will probably need for the hand part. So for my mittens I cast on 76 stitches on 2mm needles with Rowan 4ply and knitted 20 rounds in knit 2 purl 2 rib. Then I increased to 84 stitches by knit 9, make 1, knit 10, make1 for a total of four times. This adds the 8 extra stitches needed to bring the stitch count up to a number divisible by 14 ready to start the colourwork pattern.

 

The pattern is, allegedly, a four-leaf clover but at the moment it looks more like coffee beans! and it's taking a while - tiny, tiny needles and tiny, tiny wool, but it's coming along and I am enjoying it well much.

During February I also spent a lovely Saturday carding fleece with my friend Julie. We don't get to meet up very often as we are both so busy so it was good to catch up, drink tea and card interspersed with a spot of lunch and updates from the Six Nations via her husband and little boy. I managed to get through quite a bit of the Jacob fleece I have been working on and got quite a bit carded. I'd given Julie a wodge of the Jacob the last time we'd met up and she had spun it up and knit it into a hat, it looked very good and was very fetching on. For my bit of Jacob I think that I will probably start with some mittens (what a surprise! lol) and probably have a blue stripe on them somewhere using some of the teal spindle spun I did last December.

February's Spinning Guild meeting consisted of a skills day which was really very good indeed. Three Guild members took a workshop each in spinning longdraw, Navajo plying and using a warping mill. In the morning I learnt to spin longdraw which was fun as I seemed to need to take up loads of space with my right arm! p
Practise will hopefully enhance my rather inelegant technique - put it this way, it better!! Here is my progress so far. Carol, the tutor, described it as "art yarn", lol:-) it is a bit lumpy bumpy but I expect that it will even out when I ply it.

After our soup and bread lunch (I made tomato and lentil and everyone liked it very much) I swapped workshops and learnt to Navajo ply with Brenda. She showed us how it was done, a bit like crocheting a long chain, and then let us have a go at doing it ourselves on her wheel; a double treadle Louet; a very nice wheel. The first lady to have a go managed to get the technique off pat straight away; I managed to make a bit of a hash of it and was all fingers and thumbs until I'd got the gist, then it was actually very easy. Brenda explained that Navajo plying creates a three ply yarn, can be used to maintain colour repeats and creates a rounded profile in the finished yarn making it a warmer yarn. So, I'm planning on using this technique to ply my scrap swap singles (got to spin them yet!) so that I can maintain the colours and not get the barber-pole affect.

Recently we have been getting some nice sunny weather and this morning I've managed to get the washing out on the line. The daffodils are out by the back door and they look very cheery indeed. Things are beginning to stir out in the garden and I'm starting to think about what to grow in the veggie patch this year as it'll be time to start planting seeds indoors soon. I dug over half the veggie patch last Sunday, with the help of the chickens.

The chickens are doing well and both are now laying regularly. Miranda has got all her feathers back now after moulting during the coldest winter we have had for years! mad bird. Apparently it was down to minus 14 degrees celsius at it's coldest (Jenny's son measured it) and the river was frozen over on Christmas morning. Anyway here are the girls, Amy in the background as she is camera shy, Miranda at the front as she is a tart!

I gave them some yoghurt this morning, they really do enjoy their yoghurt and apparently it is very good for their little tummies. Here they are tucking in, it can get a bit messy!

 

 

Bye, bye, 'till next time:-)

Spinning wheels

Well I spent all of the weekend before last in bed with some really rather nasty germs. I think that they attacked me at work and by Saturday they were well entrenched and playing havoc. DH brought me tea, bascons sarnies and medicine and made sure that I was ok. I'm all mended now though thanks to the power of Beachams All in One cough mixture, yay:-)

Anyway, during the week I did manage to get some spinning done. I've been spining some Cotswold tops that my neighbour very kindly donated to my cause; I'm spinning the singles on my Timbertops Leicester, Lois, and the plying them on my Ashford Traddy, Nimue, using a Jumbo Flyer (or Funky Flyer as DH called it) that my lovely neighbour also gave me. By plying on the jumbo flyer I can "empty" both of the Timbertops bobbins without having to change bobins halfway through so I get all the plyed yarn in one continous length....brill!

So here is some of the yarn that I've been spinning and plying

and heres Lois and Nimue sunning themselves in the garden last Saturday.

 

We're not entirley sure but we think that Lois may be made of Yew; anyway whatever she is made of she's a fab wheel.

In the hen department Amy and Miranda are now getting on well with very few "arguments". Amy follows Miranda about the garden checking out all the little nooks and corners, she's still a bit shy of people but she is getting used to us. She started laying last week so now we get one normal sized Miranda egg and one smaller Amy egg - yummy:-)

Tommorow, the 18th, my neighbour and I are going to visit the Somerset Guild of Weavers Dyers and Spinners at their monthly meeting. There's going to be spinning and chatting and a talk from a guy called Ian Tait who makes spindles....should be well interesting and two other peeps from Knit Club have said that they may also be coming alsong as well....cool:-)

More soon:-)

"What I did on my Summer Holidays" by Pearle

As we have been so busy since my last post I haven't had time to post. We have been here there and everywhere having fun. This is my "back to school essay" and for the ladies in Congleton......thank you for reading my exploits, it's nice to know you enjoy my ramblings:-)

OK so first off we went to Malborough Jazz Festival which was fab as usual but actually this one was the best one I've been to so far. We stayed with friends who live in Malborough and kindly put us up each year (or is that put up with us, he he). We are volunteer stewards and this year we were stewarding at the Azuza Cafe and Night Club. We were upstairs in the Night Club during the Saturday afternoon slot from 3pm until 6pm with the "The Baddest Blues Band Ever". The folk at Azuza looked after us very well with free cola and cups of tea during our stint and the punters were fun and had a good time. After our stint we met up with our friends and their two little kiddies who were by now a bit tired from all the excitement so they went home to be put to bed and have stories while DH and I went for dinner at the the Castle and Ball Hotel. The Castle and Ball is a very old (even by Malborough standards) Hotel/Pub right on the High Street. It has a really nice dining room at the back of the building and we sat down to a "whatever you would like" dinner. Unfortunately DH hadn't brought his glasses with him so he had to rely on me reading out the menu, lol:-) After dinner we found a couple of comfy armchairs at the back of the adjacent lounge bar and enjoyed our drinks with some very good Jazz. Then our friend arrived and we went out into the world of Jazz that is Malborough Jazz Fest.

I then spent a lovely long weekend visiting my Mum and Dad. We spent a lovely day at Tatton Flower Show ( a bit like Chelsea but up North).There were some fun exhibits amongst the usual pretty gardens full of flowers. Here's a selection.

Next on the agenda was Robs Birthday weekend camping at Llanthony Priory  which was a little damp but there was a good turn out of folk. We got there a little late and met folk in the lane as they were on the way the pub for tea. We managed to get the outside part of our new tent put up and then followed them, got some tea and drank a few ciders. Then, suitably fortified, we went back to the campsite and our fab friends proceeded to finish putting up our tent in the dark while DH and I sorted out the air bed, sleeping bag, pillows and other stuff for comfy camping. We then continued a very pleasant round the campfire evening with more cider until rain stopped play and it was time for bed. Rob has a device that can detect bats and there were quite a lot of bats about judging from all the clicks and squeaks coming from the device. There are lots of old trees and of course the priory ruins for them to live in. Next morning the weather improved and was dry so we sat about and drank coffee and had bacon butties before heading off home.

Then we spent a lovely weekend on Dartmoor camping with friends for Blues 40th Birthday. A barbecue, cake, music, good company, clear starlight skies, a big fire, fireworks and lanterns - we all had a lovely time. It was great to see folks that we hadn't seen in years, there was a bit of catching up to do. The field was great and in the middle of nowhere and we could do as we please because we were the only folk there with no houses or other people within yelling distance - great!

Busy, busy.... but I have managed to do some knitting and some spinning. I have finished the alpaca Ishbel. In fact I took it to my mums so that she could see it. I also took my Ashford so she could see what spinning is all about. Here's the Ishbel. Its all pinned out on the spare bed blocking which has made a big difference to it.

Before it was blocked it was all scrunched up and it was difficult to see the lace pattern.

The  Old Shell Shawl is coming along, there will be pictures of that next time. Also, I have spun up another 250g of the fibre from Coldharbour Mill. I thought that I would have enough of the first batch to make a cardy as I though I had 400g but I had only got 250g so Lesley from Knit Club said she'd pick some up for me on her way past Coldharbour Mill - result! But, they didn't have any - boo! but Lesley being the fab person that she is sold me the bag she had - yay! so that is now all spun up....just need to wash it and felt it slightly like the last lot.

I've also been spinning some Cotswold which my neighbour gave me when I bought her Leicester and her drumcarder; she was downsizing her spinning equipment collection so I was only doing the decent thing and helping her out....Lesley has bought her Haldane spinning wheel which is a lovely wheel. But how jammy am I? an original Timbertops Leicester; it's just fantastic, like the Rolls Royce of spinning wheels. The Cotswold is spinning itself on the Leicester! Maybe som pics of the Leicester in the next post....we'll see.

So now we are almost up to date, phew!
Last weekend we actually were here at home ALL weekend so we went to Annie Halls Poultry and came home with Amy. Here she is in the courgette patch....she's still a little shy.

Amy is a Light Sussex and she's about four month old so about the age of a teenager in hen terms. We just got one as we were not sure how Miranda would react. We collected Amy in a cat carry box and when we got her home we put the box in the hen enclosure, left the box door open and then just left them to get on with it. That was last Saturday. There was a bit of argy bargy and Miranda did throw her weight about a bit. Amy was chased up onto the top of the hen house on more than one occasion and received a few well placed pecks but things got better each day and now Miranda is quite happy with Amy being around and they go to bed without any bother.

And yesterday?
Well my neighbour and I went to Kilver Court Gardens where we met the Somerset Guild of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers and did some spinning with them....quite a lot of spinning acctually.... and some knitting, eating chocolate and drinking tea. They were lovely ladies and I think that I may join their Guild. The gardens were fab, here's some pics of the day.

So, that is what I have been up to this summer. We are off out this afternoon for tea with DHs parents. The sun is shinning , the washing is out and the chooks are sunbathing. More soon:-)