Two fish and a chick with sticks

I've moved!

2009-01-17T00:48:00.002Z

My new blog's now online here: www.wildcraft.co.uk/blog

See you over there!

Delay in transmission

2009-01-14T23:50:00.004Z

My apologies for the delay in transmission, dear blog readers. I've been setting up a new blog which will be hosted on the Wildcraft site, it's going to be lovely and shiny. It shouldn't be long now before it's ready. Watch here for news and a link when it's up and ready to read!

I've been doing plenty of spinning, knitting and dyeing too, so there'll be plenty to write about. Oh and the first lot of coloured Ryeland lambs are due within a fortnight. I'm so excited, watch for lots of cute lamby pics soon!

The Pre Christmas Time Warp

2008-12-13T22:16:00.004Z

Ok, so I've not been so good with the blogging lately. I'm blaming Christmas, and the time-distortion that seems to accompany it every year, compressing four weeks into the time of one! But mainly I haven't blogged because I've been so preoccupied with knitting and spinning secret items that I haven't had a chance to take photos of them, nor could I show any photos as that would give away the secrets, doh!

Here's a photo of the one project I can show pics of, some finished calendulas sock yarn:

When I posted about this yarn before I was spinning it on a drop spindle. However, my wheel has been looking lonely and unloved lately, so one evening I transferred the calendulas yarn to my wheel (Rose) and finished spinning and plying it there. The skein of wheelspun yarn looks pretty similar to the spindled version, which I'm very happy about - it means I'm consistent in my spinning at least... Now to decide on a sock pattern for this, I'm currently thinking I might try a Yarnissima pattern, either the Firestarters or the Fratellos, depends how brave I'm feeling. In any event I have a while to choose, as I won't begin these until after all the Christmas knitting is completed (unless that Christmas time distortion gets invoked again). Will keep you posted!

And in the meantime I've been very busy dyeing wool and completing spindles for the Wildcraft shop. These resin spindles went in the latest update, some of them are still available:

I've started making the shafts for the newer spindles myself, rather than using chopsticks as I did for the earlier resin versions. This has meant I had to learn how to use my mum's woodturning lathe. I'm still only at the 'point a chisel at the spinning thing and hope it looks ok' stage, but the spindles are turning out nicely - and I haven't lost any fingers so far!

Right, I'd better get back to my knitting...

A New Recruit

2008-11-24T17:52:00.004Z

Meet Twinkle the Unicorn, a new recruit at Wildcraft. Twinkle is now in charge of Wildcraft's Quality Assurance. She’s taking her work very seriously, as you can see in this photo, where she’s checking the standard of some newly polished spindle whorls:

Twinkle was created by the very talented Amy, who’s a member of my local knitting group. Amy had a stall at a craft fair at the weekend, and it was there that Twinkle decided she was going home with me. Amy also has a new shop on Folksy, where many of Twinkle's friends and relations are now hanging out and looking for new homes.

Twinkle also very kindly checked out my progress on the February Lady cardigan today. She thinks the buttonholes are a bit wobbly, but other than that, it's looking very good, she thinks it might even be finished by Christmas if I don't get distracted by other projects!

Autumn Spinning

2008-11-19T21:41:00.009Z

This week I have been spinning up some Wildcraft BFL/nylon sock batts in a colourway called 'Calendulas'...

On a calendula petals spindle...

Into a tweedy calendula coloured sock yarn...

I've only plied and finished about 25g of the fibre so far, so I still have three quarters of it left to spin. But it's a lovely relaxing project to work on, and I'm loving the finished yarn. A big thank you to Chriss, who prompted me into making these batts and ordered a custom-blended set of them, the yarn she's spun from them is amazing, mine is nowhere near as smooth and even. But it should make good socks, probably quite cosy too. I like these batts a lot, and they're fun to make so there will definitely be more around in the shop soon.

New Arrivals

2008-11-14T23:14:00.005Z

Exciting news, my flock of pedigree Coloured Ryeland sheep has grown! Yesterday I collected three lovely ewes from a farm in Wales. I don't have good photos of them yet as they've spent today inside recovering from their long trip. However, here's a sneak preview, aren't they cute?

They don't have names yet, I'm hoping that as I get to know their characters, their names will pop into my head. They're already growing used to me popping in and saying hi at frequent intervals during the day, and it didn't take them more than a couple of minutes to work out the the orange bucket means feed! The little one in the centre photo is the friendliest so far, but the other two are rapidly gaining confidence too. As I've discovered with Giles the ram, Ryelands have very sweet natures, and these ewes seem no exception.

They've been sharing a field with a coloured Ryeland ram on their previous farm, so they may be expecting lambs in the spring. I'll get the vet to check that out however, and if they're not expecting I'll put them with Giles for a while (who seems to have got his act together with the crayon action on the crossbred ewes).

And the best part?! Their fleeces are lovely, a real downland sort, so it's springy and really crimpy wool. But it's not your ordinary downland off-white colour, no these girls have fleece that varies from a pale caramel at the tips, to a lovely silver further down the staple, with patches of brown speckles mixed in. I can't wait to try spinning it!

Ingenue

2008-10-28T19:04:00.004Z

I've really got back into knitting large projects lately. I guess it's the cold weather that's making me feel the need for warm clothing, and lots of it! Latest off my needles is a sweater called 'Ingenue' (Rav Project Link here), knitted in Debbie Bliss Cotton Angora yarn.

The pattern's from Wendy Bernard's book Custom Knits. It's a fantabulous book, all the sweater/cardigan patterns are knitted in the round and most of them are made from the top down. I love knitting sweaters from the top, it means you can try them on as you're going, which makes it easy to see when and where you need to make any alterations.

My Ingenue included the alteration suggested by Wendy for making an off the shoulder neckline. It only involved changing the standard neck edging to a stretchy 2x2 rib, but the final effect is quite different from the standard pattern. The original Ingenue has a firm funnel-neck collar that stands away from the neckline, while mine has a neckline-hugging curvy thing going on, which I love. Since the ribbing is so stretchy, it means I can wear the collar differently according to the look I want. So I could have it all demure and tucked up under my chin like this:

Or slinky and off the shoulders like this:

I love a garment that's this adaptable! Currently on my needles in the same yarn (I bought loads of it in the John Lewis sale a couple of years ago), is the February Lady Sweater by Flintknits. It's actually not a sweater, but a cardigan, and, you guessed it, it's another knit-in-the round top-down garment. I'm consistent in my pattern choices at least! :)

In other news, Giles the Ryeland ram has finally achieved his life's goal. He's gone to meet the ladies! Here he is getting a final check-up, looking very dapper in his new tupping harness (which has a marker crayon under his chest so we can keep a tally of who he's been most friendly with).

And here he is is en route to the ewes' field. Sorry the photo's a bit blurry, he was in quite a hurry to get going and wouldn't stand still to have his photo taken!

Sadly, his first introduction to my three ewes was not all he might have hoped. They took one look at him, ran away and hid in a ditch! Not the best of first dates. However, Giles is very persistent, and they seem to be getting used to him now, they are at least grazing side-by-side. No sign of the marker crayon having had much use, but they're all first-timers, so they're going to need time to figure things out. Hopefully, in a few months's time all Giles' wooing will have paid off, and we'll get some lambs!

A very lovely swap

2008-10-15T20:20:00.008+01:00

Want to see something very lovely? It's a swap parcel from Jooles, the Spindlefrog! We arranged to do a swap after we found that we kept buying things from each-other's shops. So in the spirit of supporting the alternative economy etc., we decided to forgo the exchanging money part and just swap some parcels of lovely spinning stuff. So I sent her a box of wool batts, a spindle and other goodies, and she sent me these:

It included two of her gorgeous rovings (one in merino and one in shetland wool), two lovely batts of blended fibres, and some very yummy-looking chocolates.

And here are the woolly goodies all mosaic-ified for my Ravelry stash...

I'm going to appreciate them as they are for a few days before making plans for them, although there are some cute little felted accessories with the batts that are already telling me they want to be appliqued over a funky hat or bag made with the fibre. Using this stuff is going to be so much fun!

Oh and the chocolates are proving to be yummy indeed :)

Jooles, you're the best swap pal ever, thank you so much!

Ally Pally and a bit of Natural History

2008-10-12T16:38:00.013+01:00

So, what did I get at this year's Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace? Tonsillitis, yay!! Actually, I think it's more likely to have been the crowded tube trains that were responsible, or maybe one of the dinosaurs from the Natural History Museum where we stopped on our way back from the show.

But as well as an 'orrible bug, which is now thankfully on the mend, I did get some much nicer things. Mum and I went on the Friday, and it didn't seem quite as busy as in previous years, so we managed to see a lot in a few hours. I started off by making a beeline for the Socktopus stall, to take the photos that I promised Jooles of her Spindlefrog rovings there.

I've put rings around the Spindlefrog wools. Look Jooles, they're just under the Pigeonroof Studios fibres and to the left of the rovings from Chameleon Colourworks!

I was very very tempted by the Spindlefrog fibres... But I decided to be good as I'm expecting a swap parcel from Jooles soon, wouldn't do to be greedy would it?! I wasn't as disciplined when it came to the tops from Pigeonroof Studios. I see them so rarely for sale, I spent quite a while just staring at them. And then somehow a braid of BFL in 'Caribbean' coours jumped into my hands and demanded to go home with me. I did as it asked, and here it is now:

I did very well during the rest of the show, everything else that I came home with was on my quite minimal shopping list.

On the right is a skein of Colinette Jitterbug sock yarn. It's a much brighter green in real life, my camera didn't like it as much as I do, it's very squishy and hug-able. It's destined for some cabled or lacy socks for me, and I'm going to learn to do them with the magic loop technique so that I can see the pattern more easily as I knit. The ball of red/blue yarn is some Kauni Effect Yarn from the Scandinavian Knitting Design stall, which changes as if by magic through rainbow colours as you knit with it. I'm planning to make one of Cosmicpluto's Simple but Effective Shawls with it. The other packet of fibre is naturally dyed merino from the Natural Dye Studio, gorgeous stuff, it was so hard to choose just one!

And have you spotted the first ever issue of Sew Hip magazine amongst the goodies? It looks like a great magazine, can't wait to see it in the shops like the issues of Yarn Forward that I saw in my local newsagent's this morning (yay for that!!). I've not done any sewing for ages, but some of the projects in the mag are calling me to dust off my sewing machine and delve in to my fabric stash again.

Then, on the way home, we stopped by at the Natural History Museum (one of my all time favourite places) and saw these...

Cute stuffed critters:

A creepy but pretty cool neanderthal skull:

This, OMG why do they let kids see it, huge animated dinosaur (it's blurry because it was moving towards me, and because I was running away, it was that scary and realistic-looking), I swear it was following me:

These familiar-looking fossilised shells (they came from the same area of the UK as the ones I've put in my fossil spindle)

And this set of bones from a Somerset Ichthyosaur, which made me squeak and bounce excitedly because they look very like the vertebrae bones I've found at Charmouth :)

So all in all, a very good day!

The dark side

2008-10-08T00:42:00.007+01:00

I have a confession. This week I have mostly been shopping for perfume oils, BPAL oils to be precise. Yes it's true, I've turned to the dark side. Those teeny tiny bottles of scent have been calling to me for a while now, and I have finally succumbed. Look what arrived this week from Posh Brats, the only shop in the UK that stocks them.

It's a bottle of a scent oil called 'Wezwanie/Hold' and it smells amazing - like hazelnuts, oranges, honey and cocoa - all rolled into one. Delicious! :) I am now, I confess, completely hooked on finding new oils to try from independent perfumers. I'm expecting some more BPAL samples to arrive this week, and I can't wait!

But don't worry, I've not allowed the new sniffies to distract me from my woolly interests. In the last couple of days I've also been spindling this alpaca fibre from Spindlefrog...

...into this singles yarn

The spindle's a new shape that my mum's been testing out, in walnut. I like it, so we'll be making more in this style. But the fibre is the star of this story, I'm loving the way Spindlefrog's colours are spinning up. I think this will become a two-ply yarn for a shawl or a scarf, it depends on what yardage I get. And, there's more! Or there will be soon, as Jooles of Spindlefrog and I have just posted our parcels to each other for a mini fibre swap. I made her some batts from wool from Willow (one of my sheep), and she's made me a surprise batt. I can't wait to see what it's like!

I've also been sent on a super-secret Spindlefrog mission (well it's not so secret now that you lot know about it, there are a few on Ravelry who've heard about this too...). I am charged with the task of going to The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace this week, and taking photographs of Jooles' fibre on the Socktopus stall. And if I happen to buy some, or maybe get lured in by some of the other goodies that I know Socktopus will have there, then I'll just have to consider the purchases to be collateral damage resulting from such a difficult mission.

In other news, I've been dyeing wool like crazy over the last few days - all for the Wildcraft Shop. I've done a really big batch this time, which I'll photograph and upload in several updates over the next few weeks. As well as the usual range of fibres, I've done a new kind of fibre, which is specially aimed at beginner spinners. It's a super-easy spinning English wool blend, dyed in random unrepeatable shades. It'll be offered at pocket-money prices (although today's pocket money seems much more than I got as a kid!) and is intended to be used up, rather than to loiter in stash. I'm keen to encourage spinners who are new to handpainted fibre to dive in and try spinning some without worrying about the price, or about ruining the fibre.

Next post will show the spoils of Ally Pally. My credit card is already hiding, but I know where it lives :)

Not such a little horse now

2008-10-01T20:06:00.006+01:00

Inara's been growing really fast lately, she's starting to look much more like an elegant young horse, rather than a gangly baby foal.

She's not turning grey yet, although the vet seems pretty sure that she will eventually. Her mane and tail have a peppering of white hairs, but I haven't seen any through her chestnut colouring on her body. I'm hoping that she'll go through a stage where she has a pale mane and tail and a dark body. One of the things I like about grey horses, is that it's as though you get several colours for the price of one as they go through different stages before they reach their final colouring.

While I was out in the field taking Inara pics, I also caught some nice shots of cobwebs and other autumny things...

I love how the light's been split into rainbow colours over this one:

Brr..., it's making me chilly just to look! Autumn's definitely begun around here. Time to return to some cosy knitting...

Lately I've started work on a top-down sweater for myself, from Wendy Bernard's Custom Knits book. I'm knitting Ingenue, which is a top-down funnel neck sweater, only I've adapted the neckline so it'll be an off-the shoulder version instead. Here's how far I'd got with it few days ago:

It was really sunny the day I took the photo, and the colour wouldn't capture correctly, it's a much darker burgundy in real life. The yarn's Debbie Bliss Cotton Angora, which is lovely to knit with, very soft. Since the photo was taken, I've knitted down to the part where the sleeves are separated off, and started the body. It's all plain stocking stitch, which is mindless knitting - excellent for doing while I watch all the great new TV series that have started up again. Like Heroes Season 3, only half an hour now before it begins! :)

A whole lot more spindling

2008-09-20T20:13:00.007+01:00

Another weekend, another post. Seems I only update my blog at the weekends at the moment, but that's ok because I've also been taking photos this weekend. Oh and I've also been sanding my fingers, which hurt and is making typing difficult, but it's all in a good cause as I've been making whorls for resin spindles!

So, this past week I have been mostly spinning, packing things and taking them to the post office, and then doing more spinning. You probably don't want to know the details of the packing part (it's boring, really), but the spinning bit's interesting.

Here's my most recent FO, some spindled yarn.

It's a navajo-plied blend of English wool top, which started out looking like this...

Originally I named to colourway 'Meh', as it was the result of me plonking down a bunch of leftover dyes on some leftover fibre and I wasn't sure it would turn out well. But I'm very pleased with the yarn. It ended up being 210 metres long, and about 12wpi (my yarn gauge said 14, but I think I squooshed up the yarn too tightly). It was lots of fun to spin, the wool drafted really easily and made for some great mindless tv spinning. The Navajo plying wasn't accompanied by tv though, as I went really slowly and carefully to avoid tangling the yarn. It's not the softest of yarns, but that doesn't matter as I'm planning to make a bag from it, so not-so-soft is good.

And here's another thing I made this week, a phone cosy:

I'd made a bunch of batts for the shop from leftover scraps of fibre. It seemed rude not to test one of them out, so I spun some yarn (on a spindle of course!)...

Then I improvised a pattern and knitted it up into the phone cosy above. It only took around 15 metres of yarn, so I still have around 10-15 metres left, enough to make another one as a gift. My phone is now happy and toasty-warm as the yarn's very soft. If only I could make clothes for myself so quickly!

I've also been spinning some lovely alpaca fibre from Spindlefrog, on a new Butterflygirl Designs spindle which arrived with me this week... or was it last week, I can't recall. Anyway, it's a lovely spindle, and the fibre is wonderful, the colours are just gorgeous.

I'm spinning a heavy laceweight yarn with it, with the intention that it'll eventually become a lacy knitted shawl or scarf.

And finally, here's my most recently started project. It's some more spindling, this time for the Quarterly Challenge organised by the Spindlers Group on Ravelry. I'm using one of my resin spindles to spin this superwash merino top (from Violetgreen Yarns)...

Into some fine singles that will eventually become navajo plied sock yarn...

Can you tell I'm a fan of navajo plying at the moment?! The challenge is to spin 200 or more yards of yarn by the end of November, I'm hoping that I have enough fibre to make 200 yards. I think I will, as I have over 100grams of it, just need to make sure I spin it thinly enough!

Busy busy

2008-09-11T01:01:00.015+01:00

Ack, it's been a crazy week around here so far, and it's only Thursday! Things are going from strength to strength with the Wildcraft shop, but this also means I've been run off my feet packing orders, making spindles and dyeing wool. I've nearly completed my recent stock update, which will have to last at least a fortnight :), then hopefully I can take a breather!

In the meantime, some interesting things have been happening around here:

Mum's started making spindles from Yew wood, in a slightly different style from the cedarwood ones. And she let me have the first one to test (for which, read - I snatched it and wouldn't let go when she showed it to me!).

The spindle spins really well, but I'm starting to expect that from mum's handiwork. She reckons making spindles is a lot like making toy spinning tops. I never mastered the technique of spinning a top, but the theory clearly works for spindling (which I can do)! The yarn on it is being spun from a gorgeous purple 'Beautyberries' batt from Loop, which I bought a few weeks ago.

These spindles are running out of the shop as fast as I can list them, actually some of them are finding new homes before they make it there, and that's not just because I'm pinching them! Don't tell anyone, but I hear that there might be some walnut ones appearing soon. I've seen the blanks and yes, I'll be keeping one of those too! :)

I've also managed to knit up my first spindle-spun sock.

The yarn was spun from some lovely naturally dyed roving from The Natural Dye Studio, which I blogged about before. I love the way the colours are shifting gradually from one to another. It's what I intended when I spun the yarn, but it's nice to see it's actually working out as I planned. This is the first time I've knitted a short row heel, and I quite like it. Normally I prefer gusset heels, as they seem more robust, but this style does show off the colours well, it's super-quick to knit too. I've started the next one before casting off the first, just in case the second ball of yarn isn't the same length. I can't be doing with odd-length socks!

And finally, I received a lovely squishy package that I'd ordered from Handpaintedyarn.com, containing many goodies.

It took a long while to get here (apparently they had a problem in their warehouse or something), but it was totally worth the wait (and the price, their yarns were an amazing bargain). There's three skeins of laceweight merino yarn, and two gorgeous chunks of merino wool fibre. The colours are so sunny and bright, they were just what I needed after all the rain and dullness we've had here lately.

I wordled my blog

2008-08-31T22:21:00.008+01:00

How much fun was this?!

Yes, I probably need to spend less time on my computer :)

This blog was Wordled by me at Wordle.

Spindly goodness

2008-08-16T22:29:00.006+01:00

I'm on a blog-posting roll this weekend! It must be something to do with watching a huge session of the Olympics today, which has left me feeling motivated to do lots of stuff! Didn't team GB do well?!

Anyway, here's some news about my latest completed project, not a Ravelympics one, this is something I've been planning for much longer. So without further ado, meet my newest spindles:

I'm so excited about these! They're handmade (by me), with resin whorls that I made specifically for them. The top one has rose petals embedded in the resin, the middle one has calendula petals, and the bottom one is extra special, those shells are fossils that I collected from Barton on Sea this spring.

The whorls are about 5cm wide, and the spindles weigh between 20g and 25g, so these are ideal for spinning laceweight to medium weight yarns. I've played most with the fossil one so far and, like the others, it spins beautifully, I can see myself using this a lot! The white spots next to the fossils are just air bubbles that have filled with polishing compound, I was so excited about taking photos that I haven't cleaned that out yet.

And the best part, I want to make a bunch of these for Wildcraft, so I'll get to go on more fossil hunts and to experiment with other interesting things to decorate them with. I'm even thinking of starting a spindle club, where members receive a seasonal ly decorated spindle and fibre with every installment. Exciting eh?!

Ravelympics - First Event Completed

2008-08-15T18:57:00.005+01:00

I mentioned a while back that I'd entered the Ravelympics didn't I? For those who aren't in the know, the Ravelympics is an event hosted by Ravelry (my favourite site ever), where participants aim to complete one, or more, knitting or spinning projects during the Beijing Olympics. I've entered two projects into the 'Handspun Heptathlon', a Morning Surf Scarf, knitted from some handspun yarn I made during the Tour de Fleece, and I'm spinning some merino/silk laceweight yarn on my drop spindle.

Last night I finished the Morning Surf Scarf, finished blocking it this morning and here it is!

Isn't it being nicely modelled by the tree? Fortunately, this will be the one and only time the tree gets to wear it, as I'm keeping this for myself, for neck-warmy goodness in the autumn.

I can thoroughly recommend the pattern, it was really quick to knit and my 225 metres of precious handspun yarn went a long way, the scarf's 140cm long and 20cm wide.

Now my other project is not nearly as close to being finished. But I guess I have set myself quite a challenge. I want to turn this 100gram merino/silk roving, which I dyed in 'wild rose' colours...

...into a two-ply laceweight yarn, spun on a feather-weight lace spindle. I'm doing ok, I'm about halfway through it at the moment. This was the spindle shortly before I wound the singles off and started another lot.

I've got two weeks left to finish spinning and plying, so I've got plenty of time to get it finished before then. Unfortunately, I'm rapidly getting bored with spinning laceweight. It's fiddly and the colours of the roving are too pale to keep me interested. I'm sure it will make a lovely yarn, but I need to keep myself motivated to finish somehow. Perhaps the right knitting pattern would encourage me. I reckon I'll end up with 200-300 metres of the yarn, maybe a bit more, and I'd like to make a lacy scarf or shawlette with it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

They're coming...

2008-08-12T15:57:00.005+01:00

I know it's a bit mean, posting sneaky previews like this, but I've been up to my elbows in dye and wool for the last couple of days and it's done something funny to my head. At least the results are pretty.

In amongst this carnival of colour are some delicious new luxury blends of fibre. There's some BFL/silk (gorgeous lustre), and some BFL/kid mohair that's so fuffy and soft I want to hug it lots. My family reckon I should add a tagline to all the Wildcraft fibres to say that 'every roving has been hugged'. While that's not entirely the case, I do love all of them, even the wayward fibres (that superwash can be quite an escape artist!), which is why it's so nice to see them move happily to new homes, particularly when they've been spun up.

The other fibres on the line there are superwash BFL (so soft!), BFL, shetland, oh and some Wensleydale. They'll be in the shop just as soon as they're dried, braided and photographed. Drying was taking ages, but it's just got really windy here, so that should speed things along a bit.

Much Spinning, or hurrah for the Tour de Fleece!

2008-08-04T19:34:00.005+01:00

As promised, it's time for a post about my Tour de Fleece spinning. Actually, I've been spinning a lot since the Tour ended the week before last, so I have even more spinning FO's and WIPS to report about here.

The thing is, I've taken up spindling (secretly, I think it might be turning into an obsession). Don't misunderstand me, I love my wheel. Rose (a Majacraft Rose) is beautiful and spins practically any yarn I want her to. But she's not very portable, so spinning on my wheel is something I need to plan for. I can't easily carry her to the nearest seat, so I have to bring the chair and fibre supply to her. And then I usually want a cup of tea, or my ipod to listen to while I spin, so the whole thing becomes quite a palaver to organise. I'm a dashing around kind of person, not very comfortable at sitting down and doing one thing for a long time, so unless I deliberately organise time every day to spin at my wheel, I don't tend to spin at all.

That was until my mum made me my first proper top-whorl spindle, turned from cedar of lebanon timber on her lathe, which was a prototype for the ones we now have in the shop. She's now made me several and I love them all.

They're portable, lovely tactile tools and an unexpected bonus is the the feeling of connection with the past that I get when I'm spinning on a spindle. Spindling is one of the oldest human occupations, and when I'm using my spindle I often think on who in times past would have spindled, what kinds of spinning tools they might have used, and what they might have been making the yarn for. What's also surprised me is that my yarn production rate on a spindle is easily higher than on my wheel. This is probably because I pick the spindle up more often during the day, but I've also got the technique sussed now so that it's a very smooth operation and v.nearly as fast on a yard-by-yard basis as my wheel (except for very bulky yarn where I concede that a wheel is probably faster). During the Tour de Fleece I spun all my yarns on a spindle (with a small exception due to muppetry on my part, see the turquoise skein below). I was supposed to be doing some laceweight on my wheel, (as I blogged about here), but that never actually happened after I caught the spindling bug...

So this is the grand line-up of the yarns I spindled during the Tour de Fleece:

Lined up like that it doesn't look a huge amount, but it's certainly more than I've spun on my wheel in a long time!

So here are the details (from left to right):

85 metres of Wildcraft shetland in lavender colours, spun to aran weight, which started out as this:

The 85 metres was only part of the fibre, I've now finished spinning the whole braid and it's come to about 150 metres in total, certainly enough for a cosy winter hat.

Next is a 210 metre skein of turquoise three-ply yarn, which is about a dk weight. It started out as some corriedale top in three colours, which I'd blended with alpaca and tussah silk on my drum carder a long time ago. One of the singles was wheel-spun before the Tour, but the other two were spindled. Plying was only partly done on the spindle, as I got into a huge mess during plying from a centre-pull ball and transferred it onto the wheel to sort it out (note to self, never spin a three-ply yarn on a spindle again, or at least not before sorting out how to keep the plies properly tensioned!).

Then there's the Wildcraft Apple Blossom roving (superwash BFL), in cream/dark pink/green colours, which I turned into 225 metres of sock weight yarn. I think I like this one the most, and it's due to be knitted up into a Morning Surf Scarf for the Ravelympics.

And finally there's the little skein of 85 metres of BFL laceweight which I'd dyed in a colourway I called 'evening shades'. This I spun on my most recently acquired spindle, which was from Butterflygirl Designs.

And now that the Tour de Fleece is over, can I stop spindling?! Um, no...

Since the Tour I've spun another 100 metre skein of the evening shades BFL yarn, which finished that fibre, and I'm now spinning this tussah silk top from Fyberspates with the BGD spindle:

And this weekend I turned half of this beautiful BFL from the Natural Dye Studio...

Into this sock yarn...

I still have half of the Natural Dye Studio roving left, so I'll make a matching skein so I can have two matching socks.

And remember the merino/silk laceweight that I never got around to spinning on my wheel for the Tour de Fleece...? I've just added it as my entry for the Handspun Heptathlon in the Ravelympics, to be spun, yes you've guessed it, on a spindle :)

Foal Action Shots

2008-07-25T23:35:00.005+01:00

I can't quite believe that Inara's been home for nearly a fortnight. It's been quite a whirlwind since she arrived home, she's grown already and she's learning to take all kinds of new things in her stride.

First off, this is the young lady we're talking about, she poses beautifully :)

And here she was early last week, looking a bit scrawny and bewildered by having such a big field and only her mum to share it with:

She soon started testing out her galloping legs, and I can confirm that she's very fast, often too fast to catch on camera!

But I did get some better shots...

And here she is today, on the day that she and her mum were (re)united with my other two horses, Millie and Sam. Poor Inara got left out while her mum said her hellos to the others, she couldn't quite make out what the fuss was all about. But look how she's grown in just a few days, compare this robust looking critter with the scrawny beast in the first pic taken just six days earlier. All that galloping's clearly paying off! :)

We've been making hay on the farm this week, 1500 small bales of it. We make 'barn dried' hay, which is taken off the field earlier than normal hay and drying is finished in the barn by a set of huge electric fans. It makes sweet tasty horse hay (yes I've tasted it and it is sweet!), but it takes a lot of extra work as every bale has to be loaded into the barn and stacked by hand on its edge within a few hours of being baled, otherwise it degrades and starts to grow mould. Which meant several 11pm stop-outs this week while I helped my father and brother to offload the trailers into the barn. We sell most of it, but I've bagsied some of the best bales for Inara and her mum's winter fodder. She'll need the very best hay to grow properly :)

All of which has meant that my spinning and knitting activities have had to take a back seat this week. But I've still been spinning whenever I could, and I've managed to keep up with my Tour de Fleece objective to spin every day. I've even finished a fair amount of yarn, helped along by some new spindle-shaped goodness. Plus I've discovered that spindling while on a hay trailer is risky (a long way down if you drop the spindle!), but very effective - provided you don't mind picking out hay seeds from the fibre. Next time, I promise news and photos of spinning, my swallowtail shawl, and other crafty goodness...

Tour update, Week 1

2008-07-13T21:41:00.008+01:00

Week 1 of the Tour de Fleece has passed, and I've done a lot of spindle spinning. I think I've spindled more in this past week than in my entire spinning career to date!

My main project this week was a batch of Superwash BFL roving (100g in total), in 'Apple Blossom' colours, which is now looking like this:

It's become 225 metres of around dk weight yarn. It's turned out just as I hoped, tightly twisted and with a slight sheen to it. I'm still deciding how best to use the yarn. I'm down to a choice between the socks that I originally intended to make, or a Morning Surf scarf, like the ones in the Summer 2008 issue of Spin Off magazine.

As soon as that yarn was complete, I started on the 'Last of the Lavender' Shetland roving that I'd set aside for TdF. This fibre told me it wanted to be bulky (yes, I often talk with fibre), so I took its advice and have started spinning this:

2-plied it's a lovely and squooshy bulky weight yarn, I've done about 70 metres so far, and still have over 1/2 of the roving left. I think it will become a cosy hat for me, just right for pootling up the lane to visit the horses later this year when it's chilly and autumnal.

And while those two were on the go, I was also spinning this:

Which is a blend of merino, tussah silk and alpaca, which I originally drumcarded for spinning on my wheel. It's been loitering in my stash for ages as I find these plain colours boring to spin on the wheel, but it's spindling up beautifully, and not nearly as boring when done in little sessions. I have two other batts of the same fibre blend in slightly different shades of turquoise. One I've already spun up on the wheel, so as soon as I've finished the last batch I can three-ply them as I originally intended.

So here's roll call of all my spindling from the week. Pretty eh?

I've been pleasantly surprised by how quickly these spindled yarns are working up. I think it's because I can pick up the spindle for very brief sessions of spinning, whereas I only tend to sit at the wheel when I know I have at least 1/2 free to devote to it. Which is why I've only completed a tiny bit of the laceweight I'm planning to wheel-spin for the Tour, really must get on and get some more of that done... My only regret with the spindled yarns is that they do tend to end up as smaller skeins than the wheel-spun ones, because my spindles don't hold as much fibre in one go. Which means more joining when I knit the yarns up, one of my least favourite exercises in knitting.

Speaking of knitting, after some serious trauma (involving much frogging and tinking, and some yelling and stomping) I have at last made excellent progress on my Swallowtail shawl.

I've finally made it beyond the first 15 rows, hurrah! Many thanks to Queen of the Froggers for her tip on using stitch markers to mark the pattern repeats. It was after putting the markers in that the pattern finally started to make sense, I'm going to use them in every lace project from now on (yes, that means that I'm actually considering other lace projects, so it must be good!).

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted an unintended hole in the knitting, on the left about halfway down. For the not so eagle-eyed, it's here:

I spotted it when I laid the shawl out to take the photo, at which point I rushed to find a safety pin and perform a rescue operation.

It looks as though one of my decrease stitches wasn't as secure as it should have been, and then I mistakenly lifted a stitch in the row above it so my stitch count didn't show the problem. Left without rescue, this could have sabotaged the whole project, as I think it could have ravelled a long way down. Thankfully, the safety pin held the problem in check until I could perform surgery. I've now managed to graft the hole together again and it barely shows. I'd show photos, but I'd put the camera away by that time so I could concentrate on the delicate repair operation (it was like a knitting version of ER).

I'm now forging ahead with knitting the border, surprisingly the 'nupps' (little bobbles, very cute looking) are working up really well. I'm using a tip I found on Ravelry to knit them sl3, p2tog, instead of the pattern's recommended p5tog which could have been very messy. Don't want to sound over-confident, but I'm hoping I'll have a finished shawl to show you soon!

I'm also hoping I'll have cute foal pics to show, as Krissie and Inara are coming home tomorrow, yay! In view of the stress I had when loading Krissie to travel to the stud, I've booked a horse transporter with a lorry to bring them home. He sounds fab, and the stud staff have said I don't even need to be there to help load the horses up. They seem confident that they can get even a sticky loader to box ok, and they've been so professional about everything else that I have no reason to doubt it. So all I have to do is wait for mare and foal to arrive home tomorrow lunch time. I can't wait!

Oh and before I finish, here's a sneak preview of the wools I've dyed for the Wildcraft shop this weekend.

This batch's colour themes were: heathlands, coasts and skies. I'll be putting them up in the shop during the next couple of days, along with the long-promised drop spindles.

Tour de Fleece, Part 1

2008-07-05T12:55:00.007+01:00

So, the Tour de Fleece starts today (as does the Tour de France), so it's time I explain my spinning plan. Well I call it a plan, it's more a list of stuff to do, along with some pretty pictures of fibre from my spinning stash.

I've divided my projects into two types, the spinning-wheel project (there's only one wheel project but it's a biggy), and the rest are on my lovely new spindles.

On my wheel (a Majacraft Rose) I plan to spin this:

It's some merino-silk top that I dyed as a trial run for Wildcraft. From it I plan spin a whole skein of 2-ply laceweight yarn (proper laceweight, say 24-30 wpi) – sufficient for a small shawl (which might end up being a woven shawl, given that I'm still engaged in a battle of wits with my swallowtail lace one). The colourway of the fibre is called 'Wild Rose', and the colours match the two cakes of shetland top that Belaybunny bought from me recently - I think she's planning to spin laceweight from hers too, so it'll be interesting to see how the colours compare when spun up. I've never managed to spin a big skein of proper laceweight, the finest I've done so far is about a thick 4-ply weight, and I usually get bored after around 100 metres. For the Tour I hope to spin finer stuff, and to stick with the project until I've finished the whole of that 100gram plait of merino/silk.

While my wheel is taken up with the laceweight project, I'll also aim to spin as much yarn as I can on my drop spindles. (which are more portable than the wheel, so I'll have no excuse not to spin every day!). I'll be working on dk and sock weight yarns, and I'm going to focus on getting getting sufficient twist in the yarn, especially in the plying stage, which is often the bit that lets me down. I want to make some lovely twisty sock yarns and cosy tightly twisted dk's that will make a cute hat or gloves. To make the yarns I'll use more of my hand-dyed fibres, I've picked a few that didn't make the grade for the shop, or were trial runs - and here they are:

Apple Blossom superwash BFL (the green came out brighter and less natural looking than I intended when I dyed it, but it's a lovely soft fibre:

A small braid of Shetland in 'Last of the Lavender' colours. This was dyed with the dyes that were left over after I did my recent 'lavender' colourway for the shop:

And this BFL/silk blend, which is in 'Harlequin' colours. This was an early trial at dyeing coloured top.

I've made a start on spinning the Apple Blossom fibre already (actually, I started on Thursday's SnB meetup, but I'm counting that as a warm-up :) ). It's spinning up very quickly, and I'm loving the new spindle that I'm using (another prototype made by my mum, she's getting really good at these). At around 35grams, this spindle's lighter than the one I blogged about earlier and spins at just the right speed for the dk and 4-ply yarns I want to make.

In other, non-spinning news, Inara and Krissie are both doing very well. I visited them earlier in the week, to find that Inara's looking very bright and perky, and has developed an interest in sniffing fingers. Very cute...

They'll be coming home either next weekend, or very shortly after. I can't wait!

A little horse, and some very bad lace

2008-06-27T23:04:00.017+01:00

Exciting news! Krissie my arabian mare had her foal yesterday morning, a lovely chestnut filly. She took everyone by surprise by choosing the date that the vet predicted as her due date, but with very little sign that she was going to give birth until just a few hours beforehand. But all went well and both mare and foal are healthy and well. I visited them yesterday at the stud where Krissie's gone for foaling, and took many many photos! The photos in this post were taken when the little one was just 8 hours old.

I've named the foal 'Inara', as I've long been a fan of the one-series sci-fi show 'Firefly', which included a very beautiful character with the same name. Inara's also the name of an ancient Middle Eastern goddess, who was a protector of wild animals, so it seemed fitting.

She's by a stallion named Icon, who's a beautiful palamino arab x lusitano (a spanish breed). I'm hoping Inara will have inherited at least a little of his amazing talent for classical high school dressage.

It's hard to believe that just under 11 months ago, this was my first view of her, when Krissie had her first positive ultrasound scan:

The black circle in the scan photo is the embryo sac, I think Inara might be the tiny little bundle of grey cells at the top of the circle, but at that early stage it's hard to tell!

Krissie is being a brilliant mum, she's suckling the foal very well and taking excellent care of her. This is her first foal, so I'm really pleased she's taken to motherhood so well.

They need to stay at the stud for a couple of weeks, until Inara's strong enough to travel home. But I'm planning to visit a few more times before then, so hope to have some foal playing in field photos to post soon.

Back briefly to crafty news. As if I didn't have enough to occupy my brain, I've cast on my first ever lace project. This is the start of a Swallowtail Shawl, in Posh Yarn's 'Eva' (a cashmere/silk heavy laceweight yarn).

I'd been putting off learning lace knitting for a long time, although I've long been attracted to it. I'm left handed, and I knit left handed, so things are likely to come out the wrong way round if I knit lace without planning it beforehand. I've done a few simple motifs in lace before and got really confused about why my ssk's and k2tog's were coming out backwards. But after some research on Ravelry, I think I've figured out what to do. Basically I just have to read the charts in reverse, simple!

Well it would be simple if I could follow charts accurately. A few repeats after the photo above was taken, I got into a dreadful muddle. Fortunately I'd threaded a 'lifeline' through my stitches before the muddle, so I was able to frog back safely. But I've now knitted (and frogged) the following few repeats far more times than I'd like to admit. I keep miscounting, doing too many yarn-overs, dropping stitches, it's driving me a bit crazy! Perhaps I have too much foal on the mind. I feel inclined to put it away for a while and return to some nice simple sock knitting for a while. But knowing how my brain works, I won't be happy until the lace issue is fixed, so I could be in for a froggy weekend!

Hope to post some happy lace news soon. And also about my plan for the Tour de Fleece. Yes I have a plan, and I've even written it down. Somewhere, on my computer. It's probably hiding underneath all the photos of horses from yesterday... :)

Tour de Fleece, Spindling and FO's

2008-06-23T20:41:00.017+01:00

After considerable mulling over, I've decided to join the Tour de Fleece. I thought with the Krissie saga and work stuff I'd be too busy. But Krissie's apparently still some way off from producing her foal, and work pressures are evening out a bit, plus, I decided I'm always going to come up with some excuse or other not to focus - this could make me sit down and do some productive spinning for once :)

If you haven't heard of it, the Tour de Fleece is a spinning event that mirrors the Tour de France cycle race. The object is to spin for every day of the cycle competition, and to set yourself some kind of spinning challenge. For example some people aim to spin enough for a garment, or to use up x amount of their stashed fibre. Then you tell the world about your progress online! My challenge is quite basic, I want to focus on improving my spinning technique in a few specific areas. I'm going to make a list before the event begins on the 3rd July, but I've come up with a few ideas already. One thing I want to do is to try to spin some some fine laceweight yarn on my wheel, I've not managed anything finer than a heavy laceweight so far. It was a lovely yarn, but I'm sure I could spin finer weights.

Another thing I want to do is to improve my spindle spinning. I recently picked up a drop spindle again, which I haven't done since I first learned to spin well over a decade ago, I think I was still at school at the time (which now makes me feel old to think about it!). Anyway, there's been quite some demand for drop spindles in the Wildcraft shop, so I challenged my mum (who's a brilliant woodturner), so make some really good spindles. She came up trumps (of course) with this cedarwood beauty, which I'm testing out:

And I've been addicted to spindling again ever since! It's a top whorl, which is new to me, but makes all the difference. You can really make those things fly! I spin the shaft of the spindle against my thigh and it just keeps spinning and spinning.

I've been testing it out using some roving I bought from Lapoli a while back, and I've already made this spindle-spun yarn from it:

It's not quite dry in the photo, it'll look more puffy and even more knitable when it is dry, but I couldn't wait to take photos! I still have another 30-40grams of the roving to spin, and it's proving to be great stuff to practice on, very forgiving when I put in too little twist, which happens quite a bit.

Oh and I have a FO to report. My lichen socks are finally finished, yay! Readers who are also in my local SnB group will have seen me knitting these for many weeks. I don't know why they took me so long, they're a very basic toe-up design, although they are quite a fine gauge, 8st/inch I think. I used Stitch Stud's toe-up sock calculator pattern booklet, which I can thoroughly recommend.

The yarn was my first attempt at dyeing a hand painted yarn, I didn't expect it to stripe so nicely, but I'm very pleased it did. Next up in the sock knitting plans is some more hand dyed yarn - an alpaca sock weight, which I wound into 12 metre skeins on the fence posts in the horses' paddock before dyeing (Sam was very bemused by it all). I dyed the skein with long stripes of colour, so I'm hoping it'll make some wider stripes than the lichen socks. I called the colourway 'summer meadow', and it matches some of the rovings I've put in the shop.

More Tour de Fleece news soon, I can't wait for it to begin!

She made it!

2008-06-14T11:01:00.006+01:00

Good news, Krissie made it to 'horsepital'! For those who've just joined us, Krissie is my arab mare who's expecting a foal very soon, and who took a serious dislike to the transportation I'd arranged for her to go to the stud to have her baby. But, after working with her for three days, getting her used to loading and unloading into the trailer, she finally trusted it enough to stay inside and eat food from a bucket while there. Which, on travelling day, was sufficient distraction to take her mind off of running out as the ramp was closed behind her.

She travelled reasonably well (it was a 2 hour trip to the stud), and she is now safely stowed at West Kington Stud. The stud seems to have a lovely relaxed atmosphere and Krissie went straight out to a big field with lots of other expectant mares who all seemed far more interested in eating than in making introductions with her. Which is probably for the best, I'd have been much less happy if they'd all started running around wildly :)

She's due to have the foal on the 24th June, but could easily go a couple of weeks longer - fingers crossed all goes well. I will of course post photos here when the foal arrives. I'm so looking forward to it, after 11 months gestation I can't wait to meet the little one!

And as a reward for managing all this, I've treated myself to some of the new Noro Sock yarn, which has finally made it to the UK (I bought mine from The Knitting Parlour).

Bea brought a ball of this to SnB a couple of weeks ago and I was much smitten with it, plus I want to know if I can replicate such a yarn on my spinning wheel. So really it's research, not a stash aquisition :)

A mixed bag

2008-06-08T19:18:00.027+01:00

Ah, summer is here! I wish I could say I've been lazing in the sunshine with my knitting, but I have instead spent most of today trying to encourage a reluctant horse into a horse trailer, with only limited success. The culprit is Krissie, my arab mare, who's pregnant and due to have her foal in a fortnight's time (see pic below to see how very pregnant she is at the moment!).

I'm planning to send her to a stud to have the foal, they're much more experienced at it than I am and have foaling facilities and vets on hand. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to find a horse trailer of my own in time for the journey (I've been looking to buy a secondhand Rice trailer for ages), so I've borrowed a friend's box (thanks again B!).

But now after several very frustrating sessions of trying to load her, I've learned that Krissie doesn't like trailers much. I think with time she'll get used to it, as she's ok with going up the ramp and doesn't look overly stressed. She just doesn't like the ceiling over head, which is understandable, she doesn't like stables much either. The clicker training I've done with her has worked wonders with getting her comfortable in a stable and I'm really relying on the clicker work now.

She's has actually gone inside the trailer a couple of times, but she doesn't stay in for long, she seems to have got the going backwards quickly thing very well sorted! She's supposed to be going to the 'horsepital' on Tuesday, so I'll spend tomorrow working with her again and hopefully we'll get somewhere by the end of a second day.

Maybe Sam could teach her a thing or two, he used to be just as worried about trailers, but I did some trailer work with him a few months back and now he seems to love this one. He even loads himself, look!

Anyway, enough about horses. What about wool and knitting?

Well the Wildcraft shop has opened with much success. Big thanks to all those who've bought things already. I could barely keep up with the orders the first week, fortunately it's slowed down now to a more manageable level :) I'm very excited to see Wildcraft rovings appearing on Flickr and in people's stashes on Ravelry. I've even seen a few spun yarns appearing. Coley of Sheknitigans did a beautiful navajo plied yarn from a roving in the 'fumitory' colourway.

So the Wildcraft roving that started out as this:

Has now been transformed by Coley into this:

Tainted Love
Originally uploaded by sheknitigans

Lovely work Coley!

And there are others too. Take a look at what Belaybunny has been up to. She's working on some shetland in an 'anemone' colourway that's looking very pretty on the bobbins.

I updated the shop with some new rovings and stitchmarkers last week. A few have gone already, but if you like the Scottish Seascape or Calendulas colourways, they're still available. I have plenty more undyed wool top in stock, so I'll be doing some more Shetland and BFL rovings soon.

And then of course there will also be the wool batts. I've now prepared the Water batts from Willow's wool.

In real life they're quite a lot more blue than the pic here shows, I had trouble getting the camera to pick up the darker blues accurately. The dark is more like navy than the grey seen in the photo.

And I've washed and picked some of Cordelia's and Giles' fleece for the Air and Earth batts, so they'll be ready soon. I've tried spinning some samples of the fire and water batts and they're producing a lovely striped yarn, a little like Noro stripes, which is what I intended. The fleeces are quite strong English wool types, so they're not merino-soft, although the silk and mohair that's blended into the batts does soften them up a bit. I think they're going to make fabulous hard-wearing sock yarns, or great yarns for felting/fulling.

Now I just need to get Krissie loaded, then I can get back to the wool preparation! :)

Layla crochet cardi

2008-05-31T18:32:00.006+01:00

As promised, here are some pics of my Layla crochet cardigan, all finished and wearable. This was my first ever crocheted garment, nearly my first crochet project ever (if you discount the little bag that I attempted and is still languishing in my work basket waiting to be finished). This cardigan wasn't the easiest project to begin with, even though the pattern said it was an easy one. There was a lot of shaping to do and I kept getting the stitch count wrong. I ripped it out nearly as many times as I crocheted it. But now that it's done I'm very happy with it. Excuse the slightly fuzzy and overexposed photos. I forgot to set my camera into program mode before I handed it to my mum to take the pics, I think she did a great job given the circumstances :)

So here's Layla:

The pattern was a Rowan one, from Magazine No.25, which is pretty old, published in the 90's I think. It's one of the earliest mags in my collection, but easily one of the best, there are many patterns in that issue that I want to make up.

The yarn I used was Patons 4-ply cotton. It took only 3.5 balls of the yarn, so really quite a bargain project. It substituted very well for the Rowan 4-ply cotton that the original pattern called for. Also, since the yardage on the Patons balls was so much more than on Rowan 4-ply, there were far fewer ends to weave in.

I've been wearing it all day today, it's really comfy. Oh yes and for the eagle-eyed amongst you, the front pieces are slightly uneven. I think my tension must have eased off a bit by the time I worked the second front piece, so one side is slightly longer than the other. It's visible if you're looking for mistakes, but not really noticable otherwise.

I'm now hoovering up any pretty crochet patterns that I find, which is a good thing as I have quite a bit of cotton in my stash. I hate knitting with cotton, but love crocheting with it, weird huh?

Fire!

2008-05-26T13:45:00.005+01:00

I've been having fun dyeing and blending up some drumcarded wool batts for the Wildcraft shop this weekend. And of course I had to sample the merchandise, so I've done a little spinning too :)

The first batch was made from a blend of 'Buffy' the sheep's wool, some kid mohair and a little bit of dyed silk waste. I've called this colourway 'Fire', and I think you'll see why:

It's a fairly smooth blend, as I wanted it to be possible to spin an even yarn from the batts. And it looks like that worked, as I was able to spin this little sample skein from one of the batts:

Eye-poppingly bright isn't it? But I like bright colours :)

The batt I used to spin the yarn isn't shown in the photos above, as I didn't think of taking the photos until after I'd spun it up. The sample batt was a bit more blended than the others, which is why the colours have come out a quite even orange. The stripey batts will make more of a stripey yarn. I'd love to spin some more, but, tempting as it is, I mustn't use up all Wildcraft stock myself! :)

Next batch will be in 'water' colours, from Willow's fleece. Once I've got a set of each of the elements, I'll update the shop and you can try them for yourselves :)

Back to normal after shearing

2008-05-23T00:37:00.005+01:00

I simply had to post these sheep photos that I snatched this evening. Sadly I only had my teeny-tiny phone camera with me, but I think perhaps it adds to the candid camera effect...

As you'll see, the ewes have completely recovered their confidence in me after their shearing episode. Maybe they've just forgotten it ever happened, or perhaps they've put it down to aberrant behaviour on my part, I'm normally the nice lady with the treats, not the wild woman with electric clippers!

Anyway, here you can see Buffy demanding some more of those nice horse treats:

And this is Willow checking out the camera:

Finally, this strange shot is a birds-eye view of when Buffy the sheep met Krissie the horse for the first time (they're sharing a paddock at the moment). That's Krissie's nose on the left side of the photo. They sniffed each other politely, then both returned to asking me for 'more of those tasty food things please'... I really wish I'd had my proper camera with me, it was a very cute moment.

Finally open...

2008-05-18T21:59:00.011+01:00

First off, here's the big news: the Wildcraft Shop is finally open! After a week of testing (thanks B!), I'm now reasonably confident that the Zencart software is playing nicely, so do go ahead and take a look. The shop can be found here: www.wildcraft.co.uk.

With the shop open, I took a bit of a break from programming and wool dyeing this weekend. On Saturday I went with a friend to Charmouth, for a day of fossil hunting. The weather forecast was for lots of rain, but as you'll see in the pic below, it didn't turn out too badly.

I also made my finest fossil find to date, a huge pyritised ammonite. I believe I squeaked a bit when I found it, but who wouldn't, isn't it a beauty? :)

It was just lying on the sand, on its end so it wasn't immediately obvious that it was an ammonite. Which is probably why the party of cliff-hackers a few yards away hadn't spotted it first :) The pencil in the pic below is for scale, but if that doesn't help, the fossil's about 4cm in diameter. It's currently soaking in plain water, to remove the salt from the sea. I fear I might have to retire from fossil hunting now, as I can't think how I can beat this find!

Returning to crafty matters, I also have a FO to report. My Layla crochet cardigan is finally finished, hurrah! This was my first major crochet project and it's been a real struggle. I had to rip and redo it so many times! But today, after re-crocheting the edging for the third time, I finally got it to look as I wanted it to. The best part is that the cardi fits me very well, and I really like how it looks. That's unusual, normally I can't stand items I've just completed, they need to go through a process of maturing (i.e. being hidden in a wardrobe) before I'll wear them. But I think Layla will get worn often, she's very comfy and quite flattering. I still have to sew in the yarn ends, but then I'll get some photos taken and post them here. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview:

I'm now keen to crochet more garments, since I've got the hang of how crochet works. I've already sussed out my next project, it's going to be 'Gudrun' by Annette Petavy, which is another cardigan. I'm planning to make it with some Debbie Bliss cotton angora from my stash. The pattern doesn't look too complicated, so hopefully I won't have to rip it out as many times as I did with Layla!

Shearing Day

2008-05-11T17:36:00.005+01:00

I'm broken! I sheared the sheep yesterday, and it was very hard work for a newbie :( Those oh-so-cute looking Texel cross ewe lambs were not-so-cute when it came to removing their wool! The sheep on the BWMB course that I did in January were nowhere near as wriggly as mine...

Anyway, I got the fleeces off, not in once piece, but without destroying them completely. I think I'll have to process them myself (not send them away as I was intending) as there are a fair number of double cuts. But hey, it'll mean I've done the whole lot myself, from shearing onwards...

So here are some of the girls after their haircuts:

Velvet, the old girl (black head and legs) on the right, was by far the easiest to do. She's around 13 years old, so she's had a few shearings from the professionals and clearly knows the score: sit still and it'll be over soon. Do you see the wild-eyed look in Willow and Cordelia's expressions though? It'll be a while before they want to be anywhere near me again!

The Texel x fleeces are very nice, a bit softer than the Suffolk that I'm most familiar with and with a more open staple (I used to have a flock of pedigree Suffolks). It should card and spin very easily. I'm planning to make some drumcarded batts from this wool for the online shop.

Oh and I did also shear Giles the ram, who behaved impeccably, but he needs some more clipping around the legs and face before I take pics. Otherwise he'll be really embarrassed, as he looks very silly. Actually it'll be me who's more embarrassed, I can't believe I left him looking so awful! So no, you can't see photos yet. My excuse is that he was the last sheep I did, at the end of a long day and he's a Very Woolly sheep. How one ram lamb can grow so much fleece is beyond me! It was good that I did him this weekend though, as I already found a small patch of fly strike (maggots, yuk!) in his wool, left without treatment it would have spread very rapidly in this warm weather. Removing the fleece got rid of it very effectively. I'll finish trimming up his little legs later in the week and post pics then. He really is the cutest little thing under all that wool.

Photographic evidence

2008-05-06T00:03:00.005+01:00

Just a quick post today, after a busy holiday weekend which included horse riding (with Bea and her super horses Muttley and Moon, and encouraged by that on the following day on my own horse Sam), sheep foot trimming (yuk), wool dyeing (more on that in another post), and my own personal favourite (not!) - putting up electric fencing.

Anyway, to prove that I do actually ride my own horse sometimes, here's a pic taken this weekend just before Sam and I set off on a hack. I'm not really a winter rider, neither Sam nor I like going out in wind/rain/mud, so we've only recently started riding out again. His summer coat's coming through now so he's looking all sleek and handsome, much nicer than his winter hairy beast look. And yes, that's a bitless bridle, Sam doesn't get on with bits, so he wears a hackamore.

We even had a proper balanced canter during this ride, so it seems he's remembered some of the schooling I did with him last summer after all! His trotting needs work though, his trot currently resembles a runaway train going downhill, sideways!

Here's another photo of him that I took this weekend. Luckily you can't see the knots in his mane from this angle. I spent ages trying to comb them out before our ride, but they thwarted me in a single session. Next time I'm attacking them with furniture polish (thanks for the tip Bea), and possibly a machete!

Stash Enhancement Experience (aka Wonderwool)

2008-05-02T21:30:00.016+01:00

Ok, so the plan was that my Wildcraft shop would be up and running by the 1st May. But after another week of growling at my computer and frightening myself with php code, it's not quite there. Almost, but not quite. I've been fighting with setting up Paypal accounts today, which was fun. Not. And don't talk to me about filling in bank forms! I got one in the post earlier in the week that confused me so much I had to take it into our local branch for help, only to find that the assistant there was as confused by it as I was. Next week I'll be away for a few days on a business trip, but that should be enough time for Paypal to have finally verified that I am who I say I am (which after this week, even I am confused about), so look out for grand shop opening notices towards the end of the week.

In the meantime, this weekend I'm planning to dye another big batch of rovings for the shop, since I bought a lovely bunch of undyed BFL roving at Wonderwool Wales last weekend.

Oh yes, I was going to say something about Wonderwool! It was so much fun, even the camping out in a wet and windy campsite part was fun. My friend Mel was a very able tent construction assistant, and an excellent cook (my cooking tasks mainly involved lighting the gas burner, which I think scared Mel a bit :) ).

It was a great campsite, called Fforest Fields, which was just outside Builth Wells. This is the view we had from the door of our tent:

Very nice, except you can't see the rain, or the wind, or the hundreds of sheep and lambs just off to the right who spent most of the night bleating to eachother. Which was nice to hear, but not ALL NIGHT! Somehow Mel managed to sleep through all that, I think I wore her out with all the navigating she had to do to get us there (another long story, but suffice it to say that as a result of an unfortunate set of road works and an impossible-to-find lpg garage, we are now far more familiar with Abergavenny than we'd like to be!).

Wonderwool itself was jaw-droppingly packed with excitement for anyone remotely interested in fibre-crafts. By the end of Saturday we were absolutely exhausted and mentally overwhelmed with all we'd seen. But we did manage to find many nice things. I picked up some gorgeous yarns from the Posh Yarn stand, which was so beautiful it was like walking into a jewel-box. I eventually chose some 'Lei' sock yarn (merino/bamboo/silk) in a pretty yellow/lavender colourway...

... and some 'Eva' cashmere/silk laceweight, which I'm still trying to pick a pattern for. I want to knit a lace scarf with it, but nothing too tricky as I'm still a beginner lace knitter.

I also bought some merino/tencel sock yarn from the Fyberspates stall, in pretty blue colours.

Looks like I have a lot more sock knitting to do!

That was in addition to the undyed rovings I bought (merino/silk, baby alpaca, soy silk etc.). Mel and I had reasoned that buying spinning fibres would give us more yarn for less money, but we hadn't factored in the effect that mental exhaustion has on the brain, i.e it makes your sense of stash control go out the window! I narrowly escaped buying a new spinning wheel too. It was a Louet Victoria, and so cute! Fortunately, with the car already packed with tent etc., there really wasn't space for it. Not unless I abandoned my promise to collect my brother from Bristol on our way home, and I can tell you, it was a close run choice! Suffice it to say, I did collect my brother, but I have also been perusing the net for cute fold-up spinning wheels since returning home :)

One of the nicest things about the show was meeting the stallholders. There was a great atmosphere at the show and people were really friendly. Definitely an event I'd recommend. Not so sure that I'd recommend the camping so much, having survived that experience I really feel I'm due a merit badge or something...

A little yarn

2008-04-23T22:33:00.005+01:00

I forgot to post any pics yesterday of my recent spinning. Doh! Last week I spun up some beautiful roving I got from Fyberspates a while back. It's an alpaca/cashmere/silk blend and the roving was buttery soft and light as a feather.

This is how it started out:

And this is what I made with it:

The yarn is just as soft as the roving was, I keep getting it out and hugging it.

It's about a dk weight, and it's spun up a little bit thick and thin due to the variation in fibre lengths between the alpaca and cashmere. I like it a bit uneven, and I love the way the pinks have turned out candy-striped in places. I haven't measured the yardage on it yet, but I'm thinking I might try knitting a lacy scarflet or something with it. It's certainly soft and enough to wear around my ears on a chilly spring day.

Next update will be after I've been to the Wonderwool Wales festival this weekend. Mel and I are headed there on Friday, and we're so excited! Hopefully the weather won't dampen our enthusiasm, as we're camping for the whole weekend. I guess if it turns wet and cold we can always hide in the yarn we're planning to buy...

Spring things

2008-04-22T22:51:00.005+01:00

Since it was such beautiful weather today, I took myself off at lunchtime to take some photos of spring things. I love the light at this time of year, which is soft and muted, and I love the fact that I can walk about in the fields without being togged up in a huge winter coat. I've been playing around with the metering on my camera lately, the spot meter is fast becoming a favourite, especially for white flowers and those pesky white sheep.

Some of the resulting pictures will probably become new colourways for some painted rovings. This blackthorn, for example, looks very pretty against the pale blue of the sky behind.

And this little violet has enough shades in the flower alone to inspire a new colourway.

Speaking of dyed rovings, the Wildcraft shop is progressing well. I've finally got a holding page set up at www.wildcraft.co.uk and the shop itself will be following soon.

Finally, this hairy monster is also a spring thing.

That's Sam, my homebred gelding. He's trotting towards me in the photo as he thinks I've arrived to do some clicker training with him (which he loves, it involves treats!). When he discovered that the thing in my hand was not the treat bag but a camera, he gracefully decided that a good tummy scratch from me was a reasonable substitute. Which left me covered in horse hair, as another sign of warmer weather is the start of moulting season!

Tagged!

2008-04-17T19:00:00.007+01:00

Eek, I've been tagged by Bea! This game sounds like fun, so I'm joining in...

Here are the rules:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) Post the rules.
3) Share six non-important things / habits / quirks about yourself.
4) Tag at least three people.
5) Be sure the people you tagged KNOW you tagged them by commenting what you did.

And here are my six non-important things:

1. I collect wild bird feathers that I find in the fields and woods where I live, and so far I've been able to identify most of them. My prize possession is a tiny barn owl feather that I found on our driveway.

2. I didn't eat pork for several years when I was in my teens, not because I didn't like pork but because I'm afraid of pigs. Eventually the smell of crispy bacon won me back, but I still don't like pigs!

3. I have a fascination for the drawings and stories of Tove Jansson and I particularly identify with 'Little My' from the moomintroll books.

4. My Ipod is called Kermit, because he's green.

5. I can't ice skate. I mean I Really Can't. Last time I tried, I fell on my behind right in front of a first aider at the ice rink, who looked down at me, then turned and said to his friend next to him: 'that's going to hurt in the morning!' And he was absolutely right.

6. Whenever I get a new kind of feed for my horses, I taste a little myself - just so I know what it tastes like. I particularly like rolled maize.

I'm tagging: Mel, Barbara and Zoe.

Two fine fish

2008-04-13T20:01:00.008+01:00

A few people have mentioned to me that it's not possible to tell the scale of the goldfish in the pic at the top of my blog. I suppose if you didn't know that they're actually verging on whale-sized, they might be mistaken from that photo as little tiddlers. Today I put the record straight!

Or rather I try to... I took some photos of Vic and Bob the goldfish earlier today, but I'm not sure that my efforts have paid off. Most of the pics are a bit blurry because they wouldn't stay still. At first I tried holding my hand against the aquarium to show their size...

You can tell they were interested...

Then I tried holding a ruler held alongside. I wanted to get a lengthways shot of them, but again they wouldn't hold still, they were far more interested in peering at the ruler suspiciously, and Bob, the timid (red) one took an instant dislike to it and hid. You can see him leaving in the photo below.

This was not going well.

Eventually I managed to get a shot that sort of shows their heights.

Vic is about 1-2cm behind the glass, so not quite the 9-10cm high that the ruler shows, but still flippin' big (sorry, bad pun).

Eventually I gave up with the measuring, and was rewarded with a lovely portrait of Vic who finally decided to stay still for a bit.

The only thing that spoils that pic is the algae on the glass. I gave their tank a spring clean yesterday, but forgot to scrape the algae spots off. I keep pondering over getting some water snails to graze the algae, although past experience tells me that they tend to breed very quickly. On the plus side, Vic and Bob are very greedy, so they'd probably gobble up any snail eggs they find. And snails would at least stay still for their portraits!

FO's

2008-04-12T12:46:00.009+01:00

The handspun socks are finished! I think stripes on the second sock came out even better than the first, but they still match pretty well.

It had taken me a while to spin the yarn and it looks as though I didn't manage to stick to the same spinning thickness all the way through. So my spun yarn was a bit finer by the time I reached the second sock, which means it's slightly off gauge and a bit smaller than the first. But hopefully no-one will notice that when I'm wearing them and jumping around!

Spurred on by this success, I've also finished spinning up the BFL roving that I mentioned in my previous post. I navajo plied this one too as I want to see that stripey thing again when I knit the next pair of socks (yes, I'm obsessed by knitting socks, I admit it). The BFL fibre wasn't quite as soft as I hoped, I suspect it was just a bad batch as I've spun other BFL that's way softer. But it'll do for socks, and it's made a pretty yarn. I'll have to knit toe-ups again with this yarn, the 70grams of roving only made 190mtrs of yarn. But that should be just enough yarn for socks for me, I have little feet.

Socks, again.

2008-04-06T20:09:00.006+01:00

Back in January I posted about some superwash sock yarn that I was spinning from some roving I'd bought from Violet Green Yarns.

Just to remind you (and me), here's a photo of the roving before I spun it up.

I did actually finish spinning that yarn, a whole 100grams of it. It turned into three beautiful skeins of stripey navajo plied yarn in pretty burgundy and yellow colours.

They sat in my stash maturing for a couple of months. Well I say maturing, actually I couldn't bring myself to undo those pretty skeins. I've been taking them out and admiring them from time to time, muttering Gollum-like about 'my precious skeins'. Fortunately, my desire to knit with the yarn has overcome the power of the skeins, and I've now taken them apart and knit them into socks. Or rather, one sock and a bit.

Here's the sock:

And here's the sock and a bit:

Are they not striping nicely? I'm loving knitting with the yarn, and I'm loving the striping. I'm now also hooked on knitting socks with handspun! As soon as this pair is finished I'm hoping I'll also be ready with the yarn I'm spinning from this roving:

This is a roving that was left over after my big Easter dyeing session. It's BFL, dyed in the dyes that were left over from doing a another roving in 'sunset' colours. I'm currently spinning it finely, with a navajo plied sock yarn in mind. I'll keep you posted on how it turns out.

In the meantime, it's back to knitting that lovely stripey second sock for me, while watching a spot of Dr Who (yay for the return of the Dr! :) ).

Mitts and bits

2008-03-28T19:18:00.009Z

A few weeks ago, my good friend Mel gave me these beautiful handknitted mitts for my birthday. I believe the pattern she used was called 'Princess Mitts' (see the pattern here).

The yarn she used was Twilleys Freedom Spirit, which is a soft single ply wool, in a pretty blue/purple colourway. I love how the cable patterns on the top of the hand have come out so subtly in this yarn, they're lovely and soft to wear too. I use them to keep my hands warm when it's cold at my computer desk, my hands can get really chilly when I'm using the mouse a lot, these mitts keep my hands warm, but leave my fingers free to hit that all important 'buy it now button' :)

Since seeing how nicely the yarn knitted up, I bought some to knit my friend Clare's birthday present (it must be a very birthdayish yarn), who received a Chromosome cap from me last week (Clare's a research biologist).

Again, the cabling patterns have come out very subtly, with just enough definition to show, but not clashing with the striping of the yarn.

Up close, you can see a bit more detail of the chromosome patterns:

As I knitted with the Freedom Sprit yarn, I did my usual 'so how did they make this?' analysis. I found that it's a single ply, spun from a reasonably long stapled wool and with very little twist. I decided to have a go at replicating it with some painted roving I had in my stash.

The roving I used was some I bought from Lapoli on Etsy a few weeks ago. Originally I'd intended to use it for sock yarn, but I'd bought three braids in different colours and I already have many unknitted skeins of sock yarn, so the pretty blue and brown stuff went into my experiment.

I'd already split and predrafted the roving, so it was about pencil thickness. I set my wheel to its lowest ratio and treadled REALLY slowly, then I just passed the roving onto the bobbin with hardly any drafting at all. My feet kept getting twitchy and trying to treadle faster, so I got a few twisty parts, but overall it came out well. I washed and abused the resulting yarn (yes that's a technical term), i.e. I washed it roughly in hot, then cold water with soap, which helped felt it a little. And it came out like this:

It's a bit more bumpy than I wanted, and quite a lot bulkier, but unlike the Twilleys yarn, it's surprisingly resilient. I tried breaking off a piece earlier and had to resort to scissors, it was that well held together.

The skein's been sitting and goading me into using it all morning. Good thing I had the day off work! I decided to make another pair of mitts with it, an outdoor pair this time, as Mel's mitts are definitely indoor wear (Princesses don't mix well with the mud around here on the farm :) ). So, I spent the afternoon knitting my newly-spun yarn into some Maine Morning Mitts, as well as baking chocolate chip cookies. Haven't been this domesticated in ages! :)

Here's how they came out:

Actually, I've only finished one mitt. The other needs to be completed this evening as I'm going to the coast tomorrow and the weather forecast is windy, mitts will definitely be a requirement.

And finally, a shot to show just how impressed Hamlet the cat was with the yarn, i.e. not very, it's on HIS chair:

Dyeing - the results

2008-03-25T15:13:00.006Z

Ok, so the rovings I dyed didn't quite match the photos they were supposed to be based on, but they did come out very pretty colours. Here's the first one, in blackberry colours:

Which was sort of based on this photo:

And this one, which came out a closer colour match:

Used colours from this photo of the beach at Lyme Regis:

They're both Shetland wool top and I'm having a hard time not spinning them up myself (note to self - hands off, they're for the shop!).

The day after dyeing these two, I went a bit wool dyeing crazy. I spent the whole day painting and cooking wool rovings, which resulted in this:

The second one in from the right is my second attempt at the blackberry colours, which I think came out better - although I still like the purply colours of the original one. I took notes of all of it, so hopefully I'll be able to repeat the colours.

By the end of Saturday, I was absolutely worn out. Spent most of Easter Sunday sitting still and knitting (oh and eating Easter eggs). But hey, I have a week off from work this week, so it seemed an ideal way to begin the holidays.

And in case you're wondering, I did dye a couple of rovings for myself to spin, there were some short leftover bits that seemed to jump into my hands out of the dyepot saying 'keep me, keep me'. And I simply can't refuse wool that talks :)

Dyed and set

2008-03-21T19:06:00.014Z

I was planning to do a whole batch of wool dyeing today, which I usually do outdoors as it's messy and (sometimes) smelly. But the weather didn't agree with the plan, we've had wild wind, rain, a bit of sleet, all sorts of stuff. Not to be outdone, I decided that I'd set my horse's stable up as a temporary dye studio. My horse, Sam, doesn't use the stable much, although there is still straw in there from Giles' occupancy a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, armed with a newly-purchased wallpapering table from B&Q (I usually use a picnic bench, but that just wasn't going to fit through the stable door), I set up a dye painting area and soaked some Shetland roving in preparation.

My usual method for painting rovings is pretty time-consuming, as I'm a bit of a stickler for note-taking. Must be all those lab practicals I did at uni. However, since these rovings are destined for sale (in my online shop, which is on its way soon) it's probably a good thing I've got notes, someone's bound to ask me to repeat a colourway. So after setting everything up, I only finished two rovings today, but the table and dyes are still out there, so I can do a whole day's dyeing tomorrow.

Just as a teaser, here are today's two, just before I 'cooked' them.

I base my colours on photos I've taken, the bluey/greeny one was based on a photo of some rock pools at Charmouth beach, while the red/purple one was inspired by a photo of some wild blackberries. The last batch of rovings I did came out remarkably close to the colours in the photos:

This roving, which I called 'Coast'

Was inspired by this photo, taken at Charmouth Beach last spring:

And this one, called 'Calendulas',

used colours from this photo of some calendulas I grew last year:

No idea if today's colours will come out as well as these, I'll post pics of them if they do. And I'll go back to my drawing board if they don't! :)

p.s. Giles and Splodge the rams are getting on much better now, so it looks as though Splodge will be around here for a while. But just to maintain Giles' cute and friendly factor, I'm planning to halter train him, so I can take him out on walks on his own sometimes. Splodge isn't going to like being left on his own at all, but it serves him right for being so mean to Giles in the first place!

Giles and friends

2008-03-12T18:46:00.007Z

Meet Giles, my new pedigree coloured Ryeland ram, bought to help my ewes produce some lambs with interesting spinners' fleeces. His pedigree name is 'Juggernaut', but I've named him Giles as, like the tv character, he'll be in charge of Buffy, Willow and Cordelia (my ewes). That said, it was recently pointed out to me that the tv Giles' role did not include some of the duties that sheepy Giles will be expected to perform. So I suppose the analogy should end there!

This little guy's not been here long, I collected him from his previous home, way up in the north of England last week. Surprisingly he didn't seem at all bothered by the journey and he's settled in very well here.

The photo was taken yesterday, shortly after I put him and his new companion Splodge, a friend's Texel ram, in their new paddock. Splodge and Giles have spent the last week together in a stable, separated into different pens. The idea was to allow them to get to know each other, although judging by how they reacted when I put them in the field, they still had a lot of 'issues' to resolve. As you can see in the photo below, Splodge isn't the world's prettiest sheep. He's also large, much larger than Giles, and he's keen to demonstrate that as far as other sheep are concerned, he's the boss. Fortunately, Giles is young and very nimble. As soon as Splodge lowers his head to charge at his field companion, Giles bounces out of the way. He also knows that humans are safe. I've never owned a grown sheep that wanted to be near people before, my ewes are very still wary, despite lots of handfeeding, but Giles is just the friendliest little guy. If he thinks that Splodge is looking menacing, he'll come over to me and hide. Whether I could withstand a battering from Splodge is another matter!

They look quite companionable in the photo, but I think they were just pausing for breath. Frankly, I'm not sure that Splodge can stay here for long if he keeps pestering Giles. I borrowed him as my other sheep are all ewes, and putting a single ram in them could be exciting for him, but will play havoc with the lambing schedule. So I'll give Splodge a few more days' trial to see if things settle down, if not, I'm on the lookout for some wether rams to keep him company instead.

Wicked

2008-03-05T19:05:00.005Z

I finally got around to taking some pics of my completed handspun Wicked sweater today ( Ravelry project details here). This is a project that's taken me over four years to complete - from my early notes about spinning the yarn, to finally casting off a few days ago. The yarn was spun from a blend I made on my old Barnett drum carder, using some caramel coloured CVM fleece (a gift from my friend Barbara), apricot angora bunny fibre and tussah silk. The drum carder’s cloth wasn’t really fine enough for the angora fibre, so it ended up being quite a neppy blend. The final yarn was a bit lumpy, but really soft and fuzzy, with a slight sheen from the silk.

It didn't actually take me four years to make - but I got so bored with blending and then spinning the same caramel coloured yarn that I kept abandoning it. Knitting took just a couple of months, mainly because the yarn was so delicious to knit with. It was incredibly light, and the more the yarn was handled, the more it fuzzed up. Knitting with it was like hugging bunny rabbits (I imagine, sadly I don't have any bunny rabbits to hand to compare it with).

Anyway, here are the pics, modelled by the very obliging Mavis (aka my dressmaker's dummy) who's the same size as me.

This is the front:

And here's the front again, this time showing the pocket. The pocket's very slightly wonky, so if it annoys me when I wear it,I may take out the top stitching at some time and reposition it.

And here's a closeup of the soft fuzziness of it:

Oh yes, and the pattern's 'Wicked' by Zephyr Style. It was knitted from the top down, which I'd not tried for a jumper before, but I enjoyed it so much that I now don't want to knit any other way. It's a great pattern, really easy to follow and adapt for custom fit. I altered the hemline so it was a bit longer than the pattern, and I finished the sleeves with moss stitch instead of cables as the cabling didn't show up too well with the fuzzy yarn. I also added a tiny bit of shaping to the hips, rather than knitting straight down from the waist.

I am now feeling bereft after working on this project for so long. I only have my Anna cardigan on the needles at the moment, it's weird not to have Wicked to cuddle up with and knit. But I'm sure that won't last for long - there are plenty of new project ideas jumping around in my head already!

Treefrogs as promised

2008-03-02T20:02:00.003Z

So, here are the pics of my Treefrog socks, finally finished. I thought I'd get all creative and take the photos while actually climbing a tree. Which was harder than I thought - I don't have sticky feet like a real treefrog. That's probably a good thing, it'd make it very difficult to remove the socks after wearing. And much as I like them, bright green doesn't go with all my outfits!

Anyway here they are:

And again:

And just to prove that I did knit two socks:

They were knitted in Posh Yarn's 'Emily' yarn, which is a blend of merino, cashmere and angora. It's a lovely yarn and the colours flowed beautifully as I knitted. It was a bit thicker than my preferred sock yarn, and I chose to knit them using the toe-up Widdershins pattern again, but since the guage was different from the original pattern, I adapted it according to Cabezalana's instructions. Well I say adapted, I sort of guessed the numbers, and then frogged the heel a zillion times until it looked right, grinding my teeth and growling all the while. The yarn held up surprisingly well to that, considering it's got that delicate cashmere and angora thing going on.

With hindsight, I think I should have knitted them with a slightly tighter guage, as the stitches stretch out more than I'd like over my feet and I can feel the purl stitch bumps under the soles. This isn't proving too much of a problem after a couple of days' wear as the soles are felting a little, making them much more comfy.

Other news - I have now finally finished my handspun Wicked sweater, hurrah! It's still damp from blocking, so I don't have photos yet. But I have done a happy dance, as well I should for a project that's been in the making for over four years! I'll blog all about it next time.

Ravelry Progress Bars?

2008-02-23T00:44:00.004Z

How did they get there? Some geek with too much time on their hands must have put them in. Or maybe it was me, with a big lot of cutting and pasting from the techie discussion threads on Ravelry (it's easy cos they explain there exactly how to do it). They look pretty good though. Have I said before how much I love Ravelry?

By the way, those treefrog socks are actually finished now - I just haven't got around to taking photos of them. Be assured I'll post pics here too - I don't want to discriminate against any Ravelry-less readers.

And the Wicked sweater may actually be completed by the end of this weekend, as I've finally finished the first sleeve and have made good progress on the second. The body's a bit short still, but it looks as though I'll have plenty of yarn left to add to that once I've done the sleeves. I still love the handspun yarn I'm using for it - the more I work with it, the more the angora fibre in it blooms, it's going to be so cuddly soft to wear. Which means I'll have to go around hugging people to demonstrate :)

Spring with sheep

2008-02-11T17:32:00.001Z

Spring is definitely in the air around here. This afternoon, while I was in the field feeding the horses, something spooked them and I turned to see all four of the sheep skipping about as though they were lambs. There's something adorable about seeing tiny lambs running around and playing together, but to see a bunch of year-old ewes with full fleeces doing the same thing is just hysterical, it looks so wrong! I really wish I'd had my camera with me. Sadly I didn't, but I'm sure you can conjure up a mental image - it was something like overgrown cotton-wool balls bouncing all over the paddock...

In the meantime, here's a shot I took of two of them at the weekend, during a much more quiet episode in their day:

Other exciting developments today - my copy of the the newly published Pluckyfluff book on spinning novelty yarns (Intertwined by Lexi Boeger) has arrived. I've been looking forward to this so much! And it was worth the wait, compared with her last book (which was brilliant, but tiny), this is huge - and so full of spinner's eye candy it'll keep me entertained for ages. Here's a pic of the cover - the inside is just as beautiful, I'm inspired already.

I'm planning to have a good read of it this evening, and then dive into my fibre stash tomorrow to start experimenting. Maybe I'll use those bouncing sheep as inspiration for a novelty yarn.

Beautiful things

2008-02-01T20:55:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I wrote a post complaining about my old drum carder - the one that made my cashmere and shetland blend all noily? Well it got me so upset that I simply had to resolve the problem - and this week the solution finally arrived: a lovely new Strauch Petite carder from America. Isn't it beautiful?

I've been carding up all kinds of fibres from my stash (and I have a large and varied fibre stash!), but I've rapidly learned that it's easy to make some pretty ikky looking batts. Even the ikky ones seem to spin up ok, but I want to make things that are beautiful - batts that look so beautiful that I can't wait to spin them up. Anyway, last night I think I cracked it! I took some pretty blue merino top that I bought in Frank Herring's in Dorchester last week, which looked like a blended roving when I bought it, but actually was just three different colours of top twisted together. I split this up into its component colours, found some alpaca in my stash from a dyeing experiment that had gone horribly wrong (think snot green...), and a few handfuls of tussah silk. And then the blending fun begain! And from this:

I blended this:

Pretty isn't it? It's lovely and soft too. I'm having a hard time not spinning it up right now (but must finish spinning the painted roving first - otherwise no cookies).

Anyway, my plan is to take the other two colours of wool top, i.e. these:

Then I'll blend them into similarly beautiful batts, before spinning each colour separately, and finally ply all three of the singles together to make a three ply yarn. It's going to take a while, as I plan to spin them finely - for, you guessed it, knitted socks! But I think it's going to be worthwhile.

Oh, and in case you haven't seen enough beautiful things for one post, here's a pic I snapped of my little cat Fili this morning, enjoying some rare winter sunshine. I think she's smiling.

Stripey Superwash

2008-01-29T19:57:00.000Z

I didn't post last week as I was preoccupied with a BWMB course I attended to learn how to shear sheep. For the last two years I've had problems finding a shearer who was prepared to come out to shear my tiny flock. So last year, after spending a whole day shearing four ewes with blade shears by myself, I resolved to learn how to do it properly with electric clippers. Since this is a crafty blog, I won't describe much about the course here - other than to say it was flippin' hard work! But I learned a huge amount about how to handle sheep, and I'm absolutely determined to get some more practice and take the certification test (passing involves shearing three sheep in the 'approved' way in 30 mins, I'm sure I can do that after some practice!).

Anyway, this weekend, exhausted, I thought a bit of gentle spinning would be in order. So, from some of this:

I made this:

Although I say it myself, it's beautiful yarn - I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The roving was a painted superwash merino from Violet Green Yarns, which I bought to make sock yarn - and to try out a superwash fibre, which I've never spun before. I wanted to preserve the colours from the roving as distinctly as possible, so I decided to spin a fine singles and navajo ply it. I haven't done any navajo plying in ages, and I ended up in a right old mess to start with - and the cat who 'helped' me made the tangles even worse! But once I got into a rhythm, the plying went pretty well. I had to run the plied yarn through the wheel (or should that be over the wheel?) a second time, as it didn't have quite enough twist the first time. I was plying on the largest whorl on my Majacraft Rose wheel, so that it went nice and slowly to give my fingers enough time to do the navajo chaining bit, but that also meant it was putting in very little twist with each treadle. The second lot of plying hid the joins in the chains better, although they're still a bit more open than I'd like. Not quite sure how to fix that. But overall, I'm delighted with how it turned out, I think it almost looks like a painted yarn, which is the look I was aiming for. So, that's 30 grams done, now I just have the remaining 100g of roving to finish!

Widdershins are done!

2008-01-22T21:03:00.001Z

Here they are after a day's happy wearing by me:

I love how they turned out, they're the tidiest socks I've ever made (which isn't saying much I suppose, I've only made four socks so far). But I really enjoyed knitting from the toe up and I like the slip-stitch heel which looks like a cuff down sock. It makes them a little bit subversive I think, outwardly conventional, and only I know they were made differently. Well and you do too now, please don't tell!

I've already started the next pair, in some beautiful Natural Dye Studio BFL sock yarn:

I'm already getting better at the invisible cast on, I use Judy's Magic Cast On and it really is a neat method. This time I'm going to use yarn overs instead of the wrap and turn method, as recommended in a comment from Squeaky, here on my blog, and see if I get on better with that way of hiding short rows. I believe Squeaky actually wrote the Widdershins pattern, so she should know :) Thanks Squeaky!

Socky goodness and a problem with wraps

2008-01-18T23:01:00.000Z

So, I've decided I like knitting socks. This is my second proper pair that I'm working on and I'm smitten. The pattern is the plain version of Widdershins from Knitty, which is worked from the toe upwards, but has a cushy heel flap that looks as though it was knit from the top down.

Warning - knitting tech talk follows (if you'd rather avoid this, skip between * and *... hey, that's like a knitting pattern):

*
The heel is turned with short rows, and at the end of every short row, you're supposed to do a 'wrap and turn' (i.e. wrap the yarn around the turning stitch). It took me a while to work out what to do with the wrapped stitched after I'd turned the heel and was joining in the gusset stitches. The pattern said that on the final round of the heel turning part, where you do a whole round past all the wrapped stitches, whenever you meet a one, you have to to knit the wrap with the stitch it wrapped around. Hmm, this is sounding complicated just to write about it! Anyway, at first I did as I was told by the pattern, but while the wrap picking up thing worked on one side of the sock, I ended up with gappy holes on the other side. I knit and frogged the whole heel three or four times, and threw it across the room in disgust (at which point my sister, who was staying at the time, nearly suffered a knitting-related injury) before I figured it out.

When I had finally calmed down, had a cup of tea and gone to my 'happy place', I eventually worked out what was causing the problem. The gaps were appearing because I was knitting the wrap into the wrong stitch on one side of the sock. The gaps appear because the heel is worked back and forth, but the rest of the sock is knit in the round, and switching between the two styles makes a hole where the turn is. The point of knitting the wrap in with the turning stitch is to close the gap where a short row turn has been made. However, on one side of the sock this gap appears before you reach the wrapped stitch, and on the other side, the gap happens after the wrapped stitch. That's because on one side you're knitting forward in relation to knitting in the round, and the other side you're going back. So the cure for the gappiness? When you do that first row in the round after the back and forth short-rowed heel turn, on one side you knit the wrap with the stitch after it, and on the other side you knit the wrap with the stitch before it.

I've no idea if this is the orthodox method, but it sure worked for me. And my first sock is now pretty and non-gappy, I'm very happy with it. I'm just about to reach the same point on its partner, so just in case I'm wrong about all the above, watch out for flying sock needles!

Here endeth the knitting tech talk.
*

In the meantime, I've decided I like the look of the Widdershins socks very much and have been scouring the net for more pretty sock yarn. As if I need it, have you seen my stash on Ravelry??!!

A sheepy interlude

2008-01-16T23:11:00.000Z

The weather's been so miserable here lately that I haven't caught any decent light to take photos of my crafty projects. But the blog's looking a bit sad, so I think it's time for a sheepy interlude...

These three, who joined my flock last autumn, are Buffy, Willow and Cordelia. The pic was taken on a frosty morning in December, and the sheep were running towards me as they thought they might get some food. No such luck for them, as I was preoccupied with the camera. Can you see the disappointed expression on Buffy's face (she's the one closest to the camera)? She's just realised that I'm not carrying a feed bucket after all.

I'm looking forward to working with the fleeces that these ladies are currently growing. They're last year's lambs, so their wool still has a lamby softness to it. They're Texel crosses, I've never tried Texel fleece before, but from the sneaky glances I've taken of this lot, it seems to be fairly crimpy, but fine, and a nice creamy colour. Probably ideal for socks - which is good, as sock knitting is rapidly becoming an obsession for me. More on that soon...

Skeined Prawns

2008-01-08T19:40:00.001Z

That's a picture of the latest addition to my yarn stash, I made it myself. It's a nubby blend of cashmere, shetland wool and tussah silk. "What are you doing making crazy yarn with a luxury blend like that?" I hear you ask - "shouldn't you make a fine sock yarn, or laceweight for a beautiful shawl?". Ahem. Well that's what I planned to do. Only my drum carder had other ideas. It thought that cashmere and silk would look great all knotted up and coughed out over the shetland wool. "Blending's boring", it told me, "I want to make neps!" Stupid drum carder. I've been saving that cashmere for years, thinking it was too nice to use until I could spin well enough. Well now that I can spin a decent fine yarn, I have decided I also need a decent drum carder. The one I have is a secondhand Barnett. And I've only just found out that the carding cloth is classed as 'coarse' by most other manufacturers. I don't completely dislike it. It's actually a great carder for the wirey suffolk wool that I normally put through it. But clearly cashmere and silk are a step too far. My mistake. New carder required. Actually, make that an additional carder - I'd still like to card suffolk fleece from time to time.

Anyway, since the batts turned out to be not so beautiful, I decided to use them for an experiment. I dug out some koolaid packets that my friend Barbara had sent me a few years back and tested them out on the roving, handpainted style. It turned out a pretty pink and purple colour. Quite nice really. See:

Then I spun two singles from it. One plain, but quite thick (like my drum carder, not that I'm bitter or anything...), and one with big slubs along it. Then I plied the two together, coiling the slubs around the even yarn whenever I reached them. I've done three skeins now, and I'm getting better with each skein I make. I think the slubs look like peeled prawns, so the yarn has been titled "Skeined Prawns". Better that than "look what you can make with a bunch of neps".

Stash sort out

2008-01-04T14:02:00.000Z

I spent most of yesterday sorting out my yarn stash, photographing it and putting the items up on Ravelry. There are now 39 items in my Ravelry stash, heaven knows how many meters that is, I daren't add it up. What's nice is that I now have all my yarns organised, so I have no excuses for buying more yarn because I didn't realise I already owned something suitable. Besides, there are always other reasons for buying more yarn :)

My favourite find was this:

It's a commercial dk weight yarn that I hand dyed with indigo a couple of summers ago. I thought I'd used it all up on a Rowan cardigan that I also knit that summer, but yesterday I found six skeins' worth of it tucked away in my stash. I clearly made more than I thought. The Rowan cardigan is one of my favourites, the indigo colours came out beautifully and they are really colour fast, despite many washings (in the machine, on the delicate cycle). At the time that I dyed it, I thought it was a complete disaster because the colours came out so unevenly, but now that I've learned more about handpainted yarn, I've decided that I really like it. Might even have a go at indigo dyeing again when the weather warms up. Although it was very stinky, and the blue stained my hands for days.

Wicked Progress

2008-01-01T15:38:00.000Z

I've been knitting up a storm over the past few days - mostly working on my Wicked sweater. I love this pattern, it's an easy but simple and elegant knit, just my kind of thing. It's the first top-down garment I've made, and I'm really enjoying working that way. I've tried it on a couple of times and it fits very well so far (sorry no pics yet, it takes ages to put it on waste yarn and I didn't have my camera handy the last time). I've now separated off the armholes, and completed the first set of body decreases, I have about 2-3" to go before I reach the waistline.

The handspun yarn continues to make me happy, the more I work with it, the more it fluffs up. It's so cosy soft, I keep hugging it :) I also have to be careful where I leave the knitting - as my little cat Fili likes soft things to sleep on and I'd rather not have cat hair added to the bunny fluff!

I bought yarn!

2007-12-30T21:39:00.000Z

So, Posh Yarn were having a sale today. I've been oogling their yarns for a while now, so with sale prices beckoning, how could I resist? Their stuff usually sells out pretty quickly, but today it was manic. The online shop was opened at 6pm, and by 6.45pm everything was gone. It was entertaining just to watch the sold out buttons popping up. Perhaps I found it more entertaining because I got there early, and managed to get the three skeins of yarn I was hoping for. I bought two skeins of 'Emily' sock yarn (a cashmere/angora/merino blend), in Treefrog (bright greens) and Mesmerize (navy blue/red/turquoise). I also got a skein of laceweight cashmere in Veldt - a greeny/browny colourway that reminds me of the woodlands around here at the moment, which I plan to use for a floaty lace scarf. I'm looking forward to feeling the yarns in person - I've heard a lot about how lovely they are, but nothing beats the real thing eh?

So it looks like I have more sock knitting in my future. And lace, eek!

Sweet is now Wicked

2007-12-27T23:46:00.000Z

One of my Ravelry projects is called 'Caramel Sweet Cardigan'. Or rather it was. I was supposed to be using some of my handspun yarn to make a Rowan cardigan called 'Sweet', which I picked out a few years ago from Rowan Mag no. 26. I made test samples of the yarn, blended the fibres on my drum carder (caramel coloured CVM wool, angora rabbit fibre and tussah silk), carefully spun and plied the yarn. All of which took me many weeks to do, spaced over a couple of years. I finished the last of the spinning a few weeks back (shortly after I found the Lime and Violet podcasts, which have given me something highly entertaining to listen to while I spin - hence much more spinning is getting done). The yarn's turned out beautifully, it's soft and touchable, in this gorgeous light caramel colour. And then I sat down, knit a gauge swatch and disaster! My gauge was off. Not just by a little bit, but by five stitches over 10cm. Five! It was supposed to be a dk yarn knitting to 23 stitches/10cm, instead I'd spun an aran weight that knit to 18 stitches. No idea how, I'd been checking my yarn size over and over while I spun it. I think the yarn pixies must have come along and switched it. Either that, or my measuring was wrong. Nah, it must have been the pixies...

Anyway, it is a beautiful yarn, so I set about finding a different knitting pattern for it. And this is what I've come up with: Wicked, a sweater pattern sold by Zephyr Style. It seems very popular on Ravelry, and I'd been looking for a cosy casual sweater with a pocket on the front. It's knit from the top down, which I haven't tried before, so it should be interesting. So, I bought the pattern and cast on yesterday. The cabley bits at the neckline were a bit fiddly (I blame my left handedness for that). But the neckline was done pretty quickly and I'm now onto the increases for the sleeves. It's a great pattern so far, really easy to read. And the best bit? That yarn is some of the loveliest stuff I've ever knit with, well worth the effort of spinning it.

Here's my progress so far:

And here's a close-up of the knitted yarn, complete with one of the beaded stitch markers I made a couple of weeks ago (admire the angora-silky yumminess of it, wish I would upload a swatch here so you could feel it):

Socks!

2007-12-27T23:36:00.000Z

As if I didn't have enough to do in the lead up to Christmas, I started a new project the week before. Socks! Only the second pair I've ever made, and the first pair don't really count as I managed to shrink them in the wash before I'd even worn them. But these are different. They knit up pretty quickly, and whenever the pre-Christmas frazzle was getting to me, I found knitting them was surprisingly relaxing. They only took a week to make and I'm dead chuffed with the result. I used a self-patterning Opal yarn, didn't bother trying to match the two socks as I was in such a hurry to finish the pair. And these guys are really comfy, I keep looking at my feet when I'm wearing them. Now I just have remember to keep them away from the washing machine...

My daemon

2007-12-17T10:55:00.001Z

I'm going to see 'The Golden Compass' tonight, so it seems appropriate to find out ahead of time what my daemon might look like. Here he is, cute isn't he?

Yay, a blog!

2007-12-16T22:43:00.000Z

My first post, hurrah! I thought since I've been spending so much time setting up my projects on Ravelry, it's about time I have a blog to journal my crafty progress.

I'm currently knitting an alpaca cardigan with yarn that my brother brought me back from his epic journey to Peru. It's a skinny four ply baby alpaca yarn, which is taking ages to knit up, but it's so soft and huggable that I'll forgive it for being so skinny. Actually, the alpaca-ey softness keeps calling to me, and I can't keep away from the stuff, so in a little over a week I've finished the back of the cardigan, and half of the left front. Being a left-handed knitter, who is often confused by written patterns, I might be knitting the right front. I guess I'll find out when I've finished it...

This is the completed back:

And here's the left (or right) front, in progress:

The squiggly blue bits are ruffles, they took ages to cast on, there were something like 450 stitches for the back. And when I'd almost finished casting on for the back my circular Boye interchangeable needle came undone and I lost about half of the stitches. But that's another story. Suffice it to say I yelled a lot that day. Current progress is, however, good.