Secret Smorgling

I got my Secret Smorgling box from Nunoco at the end of January, I was so pleased to get one.

It contained all sorts of loveliness

  

I know I am not going to be fast enough to enter the Smorgling challenge.  I am slowly spinning the box up, I have spun the two batts and will ply them together.  I am not quite sure what to do with all the other lovely bits and bobs.  It has been a good way to sample Nunoco mixes which are very lovely.  

Holiday spinning and knitting

I have managed to squeeze in a small amount of spinning and knitting over the festive season.

Here is 'Copper penny in the soot'  2 ply merino in black and rust, with gold angelina, around 152 yards, 4 oz.  It is lovely and soft. 

Another 2 ply merino, this one is called  'At the edge of the Arctic ice' 130 yds, 3 oz. 

"The first fog of Winter"  I have spun this one from carded batt that I purchased at the most recent Winghams sampling day in Lavenham.   The blend is a mix of merino and silk. It is the Winter Wonderland blend

I knitted up some more fingerless gloves in handspun.  

In an attempt to try and get on better with the Louet S10 I am challenging myself to see how fine I can spin on it.  I don't think I am doing too badly so far, I have laced the flyer, taken the brake band off and made lofty rolags.  Maybe I have just fallen out of practice with her! 

Christmas 2013

Oh dear, I haven't done well with posting - it's been so long.
The Christmas break is nearly over and I will be back at work on Monday.  If has gone by so quickly, we had my mum staying for the first week and while she was here paid a visit to my brother in Norwich.  All the photos that I took while there are out of focus apart from a few of my nephews gang of toys!  (slightly strange)  I don't know if it is the gloomy light that has dominated recently or if I just can't work the camera  but the photos I have taken have been very disappointing.

Rob did a fantastic job icing the Christmas cake that I had made back at the end of October.  Most of the cake has now been eaten.

I managed to do some carding, I had planned to call this one 'Copper Penny' but on reflection there doesn't seem to be enough copper in the resulting yarn.  The batts were made from black and rust merino and gold angelina.  All from World of Wool.

here it is being spun.  I am just about to ply it.
I also created these batts that I intend to spin as singles using the Westbury wheel.  I seem to be returning to the Westbury.  For reasons unknown to me I seem to be overspinning and creating yarn with too much twist on the Louet.

I have just ordered a big batch of fibre to dye up from World of Wool, it might get here before the end of the weekend in which case I will have a dyeing session.

Tea dyed paper 

While I have been on holiday I have been watching craft videos on Youtube, it is surprising what you come across, normally I keep to soaping videos but recently when browsing came across a bizarre rendition of the 12 days of Christmas from a firm in the North of England who produce Epoxy Resin. 

I also came across a paper artist The PaperAddiction who has some lovely videos for paper crafts. 

Armed with old tea bags I set about distressing some paper this morning.  Here are the results. 

Initial selection of paper, the Christmas wrapping paper was too thin. 

Teabag bath 

Results 

I am quite pleased with how this came out, although I am not at all sure what I am going to do with any of it.

Happy New Year everyone!

Old Shale Scarf

Recently I decided to try out the Old Shale pattern.  I love the idea behind the pattern - I thought that the pattern represented the waves of the sea, but when I delved further into its origins it is actually representing the ripples on an old shell, Northern Lace says that the 'shale' is how Shetlander's pronounced shell.

My scarf started life as Falkland fiber that I hand painted and then spun into a singles yarn. I initially knitted this into a triangular shaped scarf/shawl, but it never seemed right, so I started again using this pattern.

 It isn't the softest yarn, but it is certainly warm!

Kettle dyeing

Last weekend I tried some kettle dyeing for the first time.  (All my previous dyeing exploits have been hand painting fibre and setting the colors using a steamer).
I was very pleased with the results, the colors were far stronger than those I have managed to achieve when I have hand painted fibre, and the process was surprisingly straight forward as well.   I will be trying it again.

Exhausting the dye bath

Skeins hanging to dry -they look a bit scraggy here and are much better dry!

Some carding was also needed at the weekend -  so out came the Minty Carder to create some batts based on the 'Sea Fret' yarn I spun up earlier this year.  

Last month I also finished spinning up some Polworth fiber that I had dyed up earlier in the year.  I spun this up on the Westbury wheel and plied it on the Louet S10.  The ratios on the Westbury allow me to spin so much finer than on the Louet, I like the Louet but it is very 'grabby'  (I think anyone who has used one will know what I mean by this).  My little Westbury is much more gentle in its take up, but this makes it far  slower. 

I loved the Polworth, it is so soft and was lovely to spin.  I got 330 yards of two ply, just over 3oz. 

I will be getting some more Polworth - maybe to combine with more kettle dyeing. 

Holiday decorating

A couple of years ago we had a new boiler installed, because we are on oil central heating the new boiler had to be located in the garden (yes, I know it is quite odd- but apparently that's what they do with oil boilers nowadays), the work to put the boiler in included moving a lot of pipes around - most of it going through our sitting room.   We had good intentions to get the pipes boxed in fairly quickly - but it didn't happen - we got used to the pipes, and they were useful at Christmas to hang the cards on. We knew it would be a long job and just kept putting it off.
It has taken a lot of time (almost two weeks) and effort, but we have finally done it, boxed in the pipes and redecorated the sitting room, my lovely husband has done such a good job I can hardly remember that they were there!

Here is a view of the pipes running along the ceiling in the process of being boxed in.

And here is the same wall after boxing in and redecoration - not a pipe in sight! 

I 'distressed' some old bits of furniture that we have - an old side table originally from a nest-of-tables, which looked awful but is so useful. 

Before 

After 

Also an old trunk, known for some reason as the 'Carpenter's trunk' 

Before  

After 

The fire-place has new decorative features -re-cycled from the old counter decorations that came from the shop my parents had back in the 1970s. 

We finally finished the glossing on the woodwork yesterday and got everything back into place - very happy to have reached the end! 

Wheels

Other news is that a month or so ago I purchased an old Louet S10 from DyeSpinKnit on Ravelry.  The wheel had been painted a weird gloss green (sorry if you like that kind of thing) but my husband came to the rescue again and stripped the green paint and Danish oiled the wheel for me.  The wheel is slightly stained from the paint, but I quite like the effect.  I love the huge bobbins and the wheel is so fast when compared to my little Westbury wheel. 

One of my first 'spins' were these batts

Into 'Pumpkin Patch'

Final thick singles 

Other things, I have knitted more gloves .... one pair in handspun camel (so soft) and one with red and grey stripes 

I have been trying out lace knitting (I am determined to do this - but fail every time)

Finished the latest Ruth Rendell novel

Tomorrow I am off to judge the crafts at East Bergholt Horticultural Society annual show - should be good!

New Dyes

Just before Easter I got hold of some more Landscape Dyes from Wingham Wool Works, I have tried various other acid dyes but keep coming back to this range, the number of colours is so good and they are very easy to use.
I had a happy afternoon a few weeks ago dying up some merino roving trying out various colour combinations using the new and my old dyes.  New dyes included;  Galah (a vivid pink), Rye (a soft oatmeal colour) and  Night (a deep blue).  My intention was to try out some brighter colours in an effort to move away from my normal colour range which always seems slightly muted.

The results were not quite what I had expected. Night has turned out far more indigo blue than I thought it would - slightly disappointing - but maybe the dye stock was too weak.  Rye wasn't as pale as I liked - so I need to weaken that, the dye that came out as I expected was Galah - this really is a bright pink (not a colour I would normally choose) but I think it might be useful to mix in with others.
 
Here is the roving dyed up with a mix of Galah, plum (from another range) and at the very end Wattle and some of the Night dye.
I have split the roving to fractal spin it.

I did manage to get one roving that I really loved from the batch that I dyed up, it was a mixture of Rye with plum and a small amount of Galah. This is the yarn I spun up from it.

I have been knitting this into a pair of fingerless gloves, the colours in this yarn  remind me of dried rose petals, old gardens and the end of summer.... I still don't seem to have achieved what I set out to do which was to a bright yarn!

A gentle Easter weekend

Some Easter moments...

Crochet granny squares -well one big square! (how I love them)..

Cosy cat!

Produce from the allotment including ... beautiful Tulips...

..fresh mint...

..and spinach.

..Planting seeds.... 

..and spinning some wool, to knit into a pair of fingerless gloves...

Heaven...!!!

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).