Wingham Wool Sampling Day

The Lavenham Guild of Spinners and Weavers along with Wingham Wool put on a sampling day last weekend, if ever you get the opportunity to go to one of these days then go, the idea is that you take your wheel and are free to sample spin any of the fibres that Wingham bring along; so armed with my wheel I went along. There was a huge amount of fiber to choose from and I came away with a skein of wool that I had spun throughout the day along with some purchases.

Here is my finished skein

It includes cashmere, purple alpaca mixed with sari silk, dyed merino in a variety of colours, a red merino and  silk mix, some pink merino with fluffy bits in it, merino and linen mix, red mohair with gold angelina, bottle tops  and crab. I am not entirely sure what I will do with the skein, but I did enjoy the sampling. 

I came home with some grey merino to mix with red mohair 

here it is carded up ready to spin 

Also, some purple alpaca to mix with sari silk and sparkly stuff and some green and red merino mixes for Christmas wools. 

I have started to spin up the grey merino with the mohair today after finishing a mix of cream alpaca and pale green and brown - I don't have a picture of this at the moment. 

Today was also spent making of the Christmas cake, (the oven seems to have been on for hours) I like the ritual of making this cake every year. I make Deila's rich fruit cake although there was a year when I deviated from this and made a Nigel Slater fruit cake, which although it was very tasty just didn't seem the same.

The cake is out of the oven cooling and will now be stored and fed until a week or so before Christmas when my husband will ice it (he is so much better at this than me).