Spindling along

I’ve been getting well into spindling recently. Spindling is just so portable and the spindles are relatively inexpensive and very pretty. Here are mine. 
I have been spindling some Romney, which is the grey you can see on two of the spindles. At the last Guild meeting I crumbled and bought 700g of raw Romney fleece. It was only £3.50; can’t really go wrong with that! Plus it was all soft and crimpy; very clean and it smelt all warm and sheepy as it had been sat on the sale table right in a patch of sunshine, mmmm, lol! I washed it and it came out really well, really soft with lovely natural shading from white to dark grey. But having lent my hand cards to my friend Ann I was a bit stuck; what to do?

Well at Guild I’d had a go with Jenny's flat backed cards just to see what they are like as Jenny said she preferred them to the curved backed cards that people usually use and which are the ones I have lent to Ann. I liked them as it seemed to me that it was easier to brush all the fleece on the left hand card with all the surface of the right hand card; it just seemed to work better.

So I had a rummage on the net and got myself some flat backed cards from Wingham Wool Works. They duly arrived and I have had a lovely time carding all that Romney; well almost all, there is a little left to do. It’s come out really well as there are virtually no second cuts the only thing “wrong” with it was that a lot of the staple tips needed to be pulled off as they were dry, sun-bleached and crunchy but apparently  this is pretty normal with coloured fleece.

So now I have bags of Romney rolags all about the place! I’ve spindled one spindle full and am now onto the second spindle. The two will be plied together; it’s looking like it might be light aran/heavy dk weight….maybe….some mittens!

As yesterday was Guild Jenny and I tootled off down to Hatch Beauchamp for the day. I took my spindles, cards and the last bit of uncarded Romney and Jenny took a little loom she has been making scarves on. The loom is so small that it can sit on the fold up table that she also brought along. Liz was there too and she gave me this.

Isn’t it fab? It’s a case for my Notebook and she wove it herself out of wool that she has spun plus the coloured wool on the flap is from our dyeing day last year! a really beautiful gift from a very dear friend and my Notebook fits into it really well.

Also at Guild I met Shani who's blog, Dye Verse, I have been reading for a while now; she also reads my ramblings on here too. It was really cool to meet her in the flesh and to make a new friend. She had been to Wonderwool in Wales and told us all about it. As we are going to Woolfest in June this was very interesting although I think Woolfest might be better as Shani said there were lots of the same stands there this year as there were last year with not much in the way on new stands. I know that Woolfest is trying to make sure that they have a good mix of new people and established people although as we have never been it’s all going to be new to us.

Speaking of Woolfest I’ve booked us tickets to the Friday night Spin-In and Cumberland Sausage Supper so see you there! We are staying at a B&B on a farm in Mill Beck which is about two miles from Keswick and 13 miles from Woolfest. The lady who's farm it is has around 300 sheep and has told us that as it will be shearing time when we are there we can pick any fleece we like! and maybe have a go at shearing as well. Liz is rubbing her hands in glee as she wants ten at least!! I have been saving up paper sacks and have three I think but Liz will have to take a roll of bin liners the way she is thinking!

Happy spinning and knitting ,
Em

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:-)

This Winter I have Mostly been Knitting.......................................

Mittens!

These are my second pair of Cranfords

and these are my Snap-Dragon-Fliptops

here's a closeup of the snapdragon flowers.

Then I made these EZ Mitered Mittens from some of my handspun yarn

and then got all inspired and made up my own mitts pattern.

 I still have quite a bit of mitten mojo going on so I've started a second pair of my own mittens but this time I'm doing them in stripes of green aran and Noro Silk Garden in kind of pinky, purpley, greeny colours, with three rows of the aran and then three rows of the Noro. I'll get some pics of those up soon, promise.

Also, I'm hoping that my mitts pattern will be available for download. Some of my knitty pals are kindly test knitting my pattern for me at the moment. I'll put a link on here so that you can download it but as I've never done this kind of thing before, "publishing a knitting pattern", it may take me a while; although hopefully not as long as it's been since I last posted on here! ooops!

Off to knit more mitts:-)
Back soon.

P/hopping along with some Cranfords

This is my first Knit-along and it's being organised on Ravelry by P/hop.

Whats P/hop I hear you say?

Well P/hop is a fundraiser for medical aid organisation Medecins San Frontieres (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, where you can download patterns and make a donation of what you think they are worth to you in pleasure hence p/hop - pennies per hour of pleasure! What a cool idea, knitting and raising money for a good cause all at once.

So this is what I have been busy knitting. They are Cranford Mitts by Jane Lithgow. The challenge is to cast on, knit and complete a pair during November and look....I've done it and it's only just the second week so I think I'll knit some more.

The main yarn is Natural Dye Studios Darling sock yarn which has alpaca in it and the contrast yarn is some of the alpaca that I spun and dyed earlier this year which I have also used for my Ishbel.

Wool Week and other things

This last week has been the first Wool Week.
Things were kicked off on Monday by sheep in Saville Row in London! and here in Somerset we had sheep in Glastonbury by the Market Cross.

 

 

 

They were very cute and didn't seem to mind being the centre of attention. The shepherd said that the sheep were mules, that is crosses between two breeds. The ones with the speckled faces are Swaledale/Leicester crosses and the ones with the black faces are Sussex/Leicester crosses. He explaned that by crossing then he got good atributes from both types of sheep.
A contingent from the Somerset Guild of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers had a display of spinning and fiberiness and there was also a wheel available for people to try out spinning on. A couple of ladies had a go and were converted; they did really well for their first attempts.

I met up with a couple of friends, Liz and Andrea, and we had coffee and cake while we spun, spindled and knitted away, it was fun. The picture above shows Liz helping a newbie spinner have her first go at spinning.
Later on I went for lunch with Liz and then we got the dye pans out!

 

 We bubbled and simmered away, drank tea, did a spot of spinning and this is what we ended up with.......

Mine is the teal blue in the big white pan (which is some of the fleece that I recently washed) and the browny/pinky colour in the baking tin (which is a skein of shetland that I recently spun on Nimue), Liz did the greens, the red and the pink. We used food dye and acid dyes and they seem to have come out pretty well.

During the week Postman Paul brought a couple of yummy items. First he brought this.....

 

It's a drop spindle made by Enid Ashcroft; the whorl is Yew and the shaft ebonised Beech. It spins very well and for a long time. In fact I like it so much that I've bought another from her which is on it's way in the post and should be here in a couple of days time.

Postman Paul also brought a parcel from the Ravelry Scrap Swap #5 which contained this lovely array of colourful fibers

I've started to spin the blues first and here is what I have so far. Its quite thin as I would like to make a shawl/wrap out of it; there's about 300g of scraps in all. I could Navajo ply it or I could ply it with a neutral colour, maybe grey or grey/blue, not sure yet.

 

So to the end of the week and this Saturday was Guild day so Jen and I packed up our wheels and headed off to Hatch Beauchamp in her Dolly 2 CV. Everything fitted in with a bit of jiggling and joggling. The talk this week was all about plants for crafting so there was a bit about dye plants which was interesting; I'd like to try growing Madder, Woad and Weld next year. Andrea made it along for her first visit and brought her wheel along with her; one of the Guild ladies gave it the once over and got her going on it. She hadn't been using it but now she has renewed enthusiasm! brill:-)

In knitting news I'm sticking with the edging on the cowpat which is coming along slowly, maybe I'll have some pictures of it soon.

Take care, Em:-)

Not only but also

Well, it's been a while but I have been super, super busy so I'm sure you will let me off:-) as long as I tell you all about what I have been up to during the last few weeks.............so.........here goes!

Jenny and I went to our first Somerset Guild meeting at Hatch Beauchamp Village Hall. We set off early to allow for any "detours" (i.e. getting lost), I drove and Jenny had the map. No problems at all, we got there without getting lost and with time to spare; people were getting set up in the hall when we arrived and made us very welcome. There was probably about 30ish people there and I was not the youngest by a long way:-) We met lots of lovely people, bought some fiber from Manda Crafts who had a table full of colourful fluff and had a super day.
Here's the fluff I bought. The bag on the left is Faulkland roving and the one on the right is Faulkland/alpaca/silk. I am planning on plying the two together, should be pretty.

In the morning we spun, chatted, drank tea and Liz turned up as well which was cool. (Liz comes to knit club with us and this was her first time at Guild also). Jen took her new Kromski Sonata which is a fold up portable spinning wheel complete with a carrying bag positively bristling with pockets and I took my Traddy, Nimue. There were plenty of Traddys of all ages, they seem to be very popular indeed.
After lunch we had Patricia Arkroyd tell us all about her new company Arkroyd and Dawson who are championing the production of wool cloth made from the British wool clip and also about the Campaign for Wool and Wool Week which runs from the 11th to the 17th of October. She is organising an event on the 11th on Glastonbury High Street, by the cross at the bottom. There will be sheep! and she asked if anyone would like to come and spin for a couple of hours ..... Liz and I will be there from 8am, the sheep are coming drown the High Street at 9am, should be fun and hopefully the weather will be nice and dry.

We then had a "talk" by Ian Tait who makes top whorl drop spindles from different types of wood. It was really interesting and there were lots of samples of the different woods and the different stages of making a spindle. Ian explained the whole process from selecting the wood to polishing the finished spindle. His spindles are beautiful, I really liked the one made of Pipi Yew, but I'd bought fluff and had no money left for a spindle. Jenny bought one though, a little lace weight one, and she has been spinning mohair on it - very pretty. There were then some announcements from the Chair Lady and then that was the end of the meeting. We chatted to a few folk, thanked the Chair Lady and packed up our stuff. We are definitely going to come back and become proper members:-)

So that was our first Guild Meeting, what else have I been up to......well, I bought a whole fleece! yes, a whole sheep's jumper. Here's a close up "before" picture. It was quite clean really, not much dirt in it at all.

I bought it from a lady on Ravelry, Moonmoss, who has a friend who runs an animal sanctuary in Worcestershire for farm animals. Amongst her animals she has 450 sheep and each year the fleeces are sold to support the running of the sanctuary. I bought just one to see how I would get on with it as this is my first time with raw fleece.
The fleece arrived by post just a couple of days after I bought it all packed into a net bag. I took it out and divided it into six equal amounts, all of it was soft and lovely so I just mixed it together. I then got to washing it which was actually a lot easier than I had anticipated. My top tip is to use net bags; I have about ten of these from last winter when we had to get some "emergency" fire wood from the farm shop instead of our usual supplier. I've seen carrots and onions in the same kind of bags so I'm guessing that those would work the same. I kept the fleece in the net bags all the time and washed each bag full as follows:

1. I ran a sink full of very hot water and added a good load of Fairy washing up liquid
2. I dumped the net bag of fleece (about half full of fleece) into the hot soapy water and pushed it down with a potato masher to submerge it fully.
3. I kept the neck of the bag out of the water and gently swished the bag back and forth so that the hot water and Fairy could soften and dissolve the grease and dirt out of the wool. Then I left it there for about 10 minutes.
4. I then lifted the net bag out of the water, drained the dirty water away and filled a large bucket with more very hot water but no Fairy and replaced the net bag of fleece into the bucket leaving it there until the water cooled to hand hot.
5. I then rinsed the fleece thoroughly until the water ran clear, spun the water out by spinning the bag around and around outside in the garden, fluffed the wool up a bit and pegged the bag out on the washing line to dry.

I now have a whole fleece washed and it is white, soft and fluffy:-)

I have dyed a little bit of it, probably about 200g, which I have also flick carded to separate the fibers out before I card it on the drum carder - I'll probably do that sometime this week and have a sample spin of it.

I bought the flick carder from the Spinning Weal in Clevedon. Jenny came round during my fleece washing marathon so we went out while the fleece was soaking in the bucket of hot water. We visited the Spinning Weal and then went for a spot of lunch at Number 5 The Beach - very yummy cheese and leek quiche with salad and coleslaw. They had fabulous looking home made cake as well but we could not fit any in! next time though, we will just have cake and tea for lunch!

Last weekend we had a Knit Club outing to Coldharbour Mill because John Arbon who runs Fiber Harvest had a Sale and Tour. There was lots and lots of fibre on sale; I got merino/silk roving, alpaca/merino roving, Zwarbles (great word isn't it? it's a type of rare breed sheep) roving and a few other yummy bits and pieces. Jon showed us round his spinning operation; his machinery is wonderful. He had a carding machine from the 1950s which I just loved. Everything smelt of oil and wool - fab. All his machinery is second hand from mill breakups. He has bought several of the same machine and then makes one good one from several; from carding all the way through to finished yarn; it was very interesting. He explained what each machine did and why and then switched each one on so we could see what it did - fab.

This morning I had a colourful parcel through the post. Its a whole load of spinning fibre from the Ravelry Scrap Swap #5. What happens is that people send hand dyed spinning fibre to the person hosting the swap; so I sent 300g ( three lots of 100g of three different colours that I had dyed last week). The swap host then divides the fibre up between the participants and sends an equivalent amount back to each participant. So I got back 300g of multicoloured scraps. Here they are:

I will spin it up and then knit it into either a cardigan or a wrap but I'm not sure which. I have enough for a wrap but I won't have enough for a cardigan unless I do one without sleeves.........so I'll have to go into Scrap Swap #6! lol:-)

In amongst all this I have been getting on with the Cowpat. I am now onto the edging and I'm using the same edging as the Shetland Shell Shawl but reversed. I reckon I may be about a quarter of the way round the edge? not sure. I am concentrating on this now until I get it completed, then I'll get back to the Shetland Shell Shawl and I will NOT start anything else in he meantime, lol:-).

 More soon:-)

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:-)