Miss Havisham's Veil

I recently caught up with our recording of the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations which was shown over Christmas, but I didn't watch at the time. The book has a strange place in my heart as it was one of my O- or A-level texts (to be honest I can't remember which!), and as I have got older I have grown to appreciate Dickens more and more,- although I haven't actually gone back to reading any of the novels! The BBC, as you would expect, delivered a wonderful interpretation of the book.  I especially liked the moody, misty Satis house with its covering of dust and cobwebs.  It so happened that I was spinning some BFL wool with silk at the same time as watching the series - I had dyed the wool up in a batch before Christmas....

Here is the roving drying; the grey is the second from the right, next to the green.  The silk element is darker than the wool and I particularly love that effect.

I love how it turned out and will try this combination again, and maybe spin a singles yarn.  The dyes are a mix of some Charcoal dye from Tall Yarns 'n Tales and a Landscape dyes called Saltmarsh - the Saltmarsh lends a slightly greeny-blue tone in places.

Here is the resulting spun yarn:

I spun the wool straight from the roving and attempted to create a fine lace yarn, but I still haven't got there - sadly it isn't quite fine enough - practice is needed I think....

New Year review of 2011

Apologies for some slightly out of focus images and one the wrong way round!

Happy New Year!

New Yarns

Claret and Mistletoe a festive singles yarn in merino. 

 Brandied Apriocots, a merino and alpaca mix - very soft and cuddly. 

Beacon in the fog.  This is the resulting yarn from the grey and red mohair mix.  I love this mix as it is so subtle. 

Victorian Fernery - a merino mix.

Moth Wings  Alpaca mixed with merino, spun into a 2 ply yarn.  A delicate mix

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).

Creating graduated yarn - Seventies Kitsch-en!

A while back I purchased some orange merino roving from World of Wool, the colour is Clementine, I mixed this with some blue and green to create this yarn.

In the end I didn't use much of the orange and had quite a lot left over; as I also had some brown left from another project and I thought I would have a go at creating a graduated batt, blending from cream through the orange to brown which I could spin into a gently graduated yarn (that was the theory anyway).

I started by blending cream with various proportions of orange, then orange with brown to create the transitions. Finally I arranged the colour from light to dark through the carder - here is the resulting batt

I made four of these and then spun them into singles before plying them together.
Here is the resulting yarn

It became apparent during the spinning process that I had to decide how to make the transition from the end of one batt (the dark brown) to the next batt, should I carry on with the brown from the second batt, or should I jump back to the cream, in the end I decided to carry on with the brown, this meant that when this is knitted up there will be a larger proportion of brown than the cream or orange.
If I decide to make this yarn again then I will certainly take more time to think about how to work the transition and plan this at the batt making stage.
Care also needs to be taken in order to get the transitions to 'line up' or happen at a similar place during the plying part of the spinning.

My Turn to make the Tea

Top row left to right, Lisapires Hamstead Heath Autumn Moments; Janebeckwelshblanket, Ruby red Welsh tapestry cloak; Mrs. Crafting, Make room for tea; Ester Coombs, Illustrated tea cup and saucer.

2nd row left to right, My Vintage Studio, Old Macfarland Lang 1940s biscuit tin; Laylaamber, Tea and biscuit hair clips; Goozeberry Hill, Spoonful of sugar; A Crooked Sixpence, Winter warmer hot water bottle sweater.

3rd row left to right, Sweettreatsbakery, Ginger and honey biscuits; Myvntageheart, My Turn to Make the Tea; Stephcuddles, Stitchmarkers; Knithappens, PDF pattern for Snooks Daisy Gloves.

4th row left to right, Charles and Oliver, Red retro tea cosy; SimplyAroha, Mohair scarf; Purlsofcolour, Put some Zig in your Zag scarf; Tinbabernacle, Pigeon oil painting 'Backwards Glance'

Drum Carding.....Finally!!!!

A couple of months ago my lovely husband gave me a Minty Drum Carder  -  I think he had got fed up with me going on about needing one & just went ahead and got it!

It is such a lovely thing, beautifully made & incredibly practical and I am enjoying myself making up new blends to spin. 

My first experiment was mixing blue falkland, dark blue/purple merino, bamboo and sparkle:

Here are the component parts - falkland, merino, bamboo and a little bit of silver angelina sparkle (how I love the sparkle -  I feel like a child using it!)

Going through the carder...

The resulting batt waiting to be spun...

Finally, spun into a singles yarn. It surprised me how quickly this spun up!

Cornish Beachcomber Fingerless Gloves

A small ball of handspun wool formed the basis of these gloves. I wasn't sure if I would have enough of this particular handspun mix to knit a complete pair of gloves, so after a lot of fiddling about in my stash of yarns I decided to use some commercial slate grey alpaca - which was left over from a previous project - as a frame.

I knitted these gloves in-the-round: it is always a thrill and a revelation to see the pattern and texture unfold as the rows go by, and I found that, whilst knitting, images of Victorian women searching for fossils and shells on windswept beaches with high cliffs filled my head.

I think the way the wool changes through greys to black, and onwards through to shades of blue brought to mind layers of rock in the cliff face.  Or perhaps I just had this particular picture in my head?

Pegwell Bay by William Dyce

About a year ago I read the book Remarkable Creatures by Tracey Chevalier so maybe I had thoughts of that as well?  (Watch a clip about the book here)

It also happened that last weekend we were visiting my Dad and, whilst there, I came across a book in his collection by the Cornish-based artist Kurt Jackson -

I was completely taken with his paintings, particularly the seascapes which formed the theme in this book.  I had taken the gloves along to finish, and it just seemed that the colours and texture of the wool I was using reflected his work - hence the name Cornish Beachcomber.

Crochet Throw - Never ending squares

There is something very restful about crocheting, I find..... I love the rhythm that crochet creates, and the fact that, like knitting, it allows glorious indulgence in colour.
I started this throw in April and it just grew and grew, each row adding to its size.  I have used acrylic yarn, which I must say I would not have even considered had it not been for Lucy of Attic 24 and her use of Stylecraft yarns - see here  and here- so lovely!
In my granny square throw I have used both Hayfield Bonus and Stylecraft DK, picking up the odd ball here and there to extend it and gradually increase the size; and I to say that they worked really well, being both easy to work with and soft.

Looking at the colours - which are all greens and browns - I was perhaps thinking about the new shoots of spring leaves appearing all around, and the long, hot, sultry summer days to come....

Baby alpaca

I finally completed spinning and plying the black baby alpaca a couple of weekends ago.  The plying took nearly three hours in an epic session on Sunday afternoon -  it felt like I had been spinning and plying this for months.   However, since the resulting yarn is so soft and fine, I feel it has been well worth all the effort!

2 ply, just under 4oz, approx 416 yds WPI 20-22

Now I'm taking a break from alpaca while I spin up some muted red merino that I have in my stash.   At the back of my mind I still have ideas for the orange & black and the lime green & black mixes (based on the chocolate theme.....mmmm!!) it is now a question of just deciding if I spin singles or a plied yarn.....Decisions, decisions....