A Welsh Adventure

I went to Wales last weekend to attend a spinning workshop with Sarah Anderson, author of The Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs. 

Sarah was in the UK as a tutor at Fibre East but agreed to do another workshop which was organised by Katie Weston (of Hilltopcloud fame) and the lovely spinners of the Montgomeryshire Guild. 

It was lovely to meet up with some spinners that I hadn't seen for a while and to meet new friends as well.  The workshop was great fun and Sarah a very good teacher. We managed to get through a lot in the day including Corespun yarns

 

Supercoils

 

 

and Crepe yarn

 

I was a bit slow to get the hang of the Supercoils so had to finish my Crepe yarn in the hotel after the workshop but it turned out okay.

Katie had put together lovely packs of fibre for everyone to use on the day (thank you Katie) and everyone had a great time. 

I drove back on the Sunday taking a detour via Colwyn Bay

Book Charkha

I received an exciting package in the post the other week whilst I was having a particularly crappy day at work. My car had refused to start that morning so I'd had to catch the bus in. A journey that usually takes 15 minutes or so took nearly an hour and a half and I knew it was going to take as long to get home again.  The parcel cheered me up though and I could hardly wait to open it.

Inside the plastic envelope was this

 

and stitched inside that was this

 

 

which opened up to reveal this

 

which when unpacked and set up looked like this

 

 

on which I managed to spin this 

 

 

I'm having great fun with it. 

 

SarahW on Ravelry (a rather more experienced cotton spinner than me) was kind enough to send me a sample pack of different kinds of cotton fibre from Cotton Clouds in the US so I've tried spinning from sliver, from punis, from cotton still attached to the seed, green cotton, brown cotton, white cotton. I've plied the singles (though I did that on one of the wheels, charkhas aren't great for plying). 

 

This is what I've spun up so far

 

 

The skein on the left was spun on the wheel with a quill attachment but the other two were spun on the charkha and plied on the wheel.

 

I went to World of Wool last Friday and bought 100g of Egyptian cotton top and my Tour de Fleece project for this year is going to be spinning and making something from cotton.

 

Bring it on!

Clevedon Pier

Spurn Point

Endpaper Mitts

Yesterday I finished my Endpaper Mitts (by Eunny Jang). As I said in an earlier post I wanted to learn to knit Fair Isle carrying one colour in each hand and I seem to have cracked it.

 

Once I got into the rhythm of it it's not that difficult so I'll probably be doing some more Fair Isle in the not too distant future. It also has the added advantage, like knotting socks, of astonishing non knitters. 

Which is nice.

The Power Of Introverts

My colleague Emma is currently reading a book called "Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking" by Susan Cain and she recommended that I read it too (on the grounds that, like her, I am an introvert too).

She's promised to lend me the book when she's finished reading it but in the meantime here's the presentation Ms Cain made to the TED conference.



TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

Meet the Family

At the moment I have five wheels as I sold my Haldane Orkney to a fellow Raveller last year.

We said our farewells at FibreEast. The Orkney was the second wheel I bought. When I originally started looking at spinning wheels on Ebay many moons ago, I saw a castle wheel that I loved the look of but I didn't win it.
 
The first one that I did win in the end was an Ashford Elizabeth.  I took my sister who was already a spinner with me to Leamington Spa to pick the wheel up; she pronounced it okay and I brought it home.

The Elizabeth is pretty much the wheel I learned to spin on and I took her to Wingham Woolwork for one of Ruth Gough's two day spinning courses (a very worthwhile £50) and various other places. She's quite a lot of wheel to shift though and I still had a hankering for a Castle Wheel, hence the Orkney which I picked up from Ebay and collected from near Holmfirth  which is just up the road from where I live.  I bought a second hand jumbo flyer for the Elizabeth and now I use it as my wheel for spinning art yarns.

So I now had two spinning wheels but over a period of time I began to hanker for a Timbertops. I'd read about them on the internet and my sister had been looking for one for a while. In the end someone who followed my blog contacted me; she had a Leicester for sale, was I interested? Well of course I was interested so a couple of trips to Derbyshire (one to try, one to buy) later and I was the proud owned of my Timbertops Leicester.

 

Now  I love my Leicester which is one of the nicest wheels I've spun on so I thought my wheel buying was over, but when someone on Ravelry was selling a Louet Hatbox I thought I'd have it simply as a novelty because they look so cute. It took some getting from South Wales to Huddersfield but she had a friend who was coming to a conference in Sheffield and he dropped it off at my place of work. So then there were four.

 I have to admit that though the Hatbox is a cute little thing I don't use it. I find that  the direct drive means it's too low geared for anything except softly spun bulky yarns and the bobbins are too small for much of those. I also find that the orifice is so low that my right knee gets in the way of the yarn between my hands and the wheel. So the poor hatbox sits in a corner waiting for someone who will love it to come along.

My next purchase was a Timbertops Mowbray which someone advertised through the Bradford Guild newsletter. It'd been unused for some time since his wife had died of cancer. He'd not known where best to find someone who would be interested in the wheel but luckily he contacted the Guild.  I decided that the wheel was too good a thing to pass up so I rang him and picked the wheel up from him in the car park at Sainsbury's at Aspley in Huddersfield.  Like the Leicester the Mowbray is a lovely wheel to spin on and it's the wheel I take to fibre festivals with the Longdraw Guild as it's sturdy enough to put up with beginners but it's reliable too.

 As I said at the start I passed my Orkney on to another spinner so I was once again without a castle wheel. This changed when I saw a Timbertops Lonsdale for sale on ebay.  Thinking I'd put in a bid but not really expecting to be successful; much to my surprise I won it. I had to drive down to East Sussex to pick it up and it needed a bit of TLC as it hadn't been used for a while but I soon had it cleaned up and spinning nicely.  

So that's the family. Some of them will move on and some will stay; there may be a few new additions. I was tempted by a Columbine not long ago but didn't succumb and a walking wheel would be jolly nice. I've a couple of spindles and I've even attempted spinning off the tip of a bobbin winder.

There're lots of spinning adventures out there to look forward to.

Saturday 20th April 18:56
A quick edit to tell you that I've just waved goodbye to the Lonsdale.  Someone on Ravelry had said she'd always wanted one and I offered to sell as I hadn't really got the hang of the tensioning system, which is a bit finicky. If it'd been my only wheel I'd probably have persevered with it, but when you have a couple of wheels that are as easy to get on with as the others you just don't get round to it.  I know it's going to someone who will love and appreciate it so I'm quite happy. (Just a shame the Columbine's been sold).

Fair Isle

Today I've been learning to knit Fair Isle holding one colour in each hand and weaving the floats in as I go along.

Someone on Ravelry posted a link to the Philosophers wool tutorial on the two handed stranding technique.  

In order to do this properly you have to be able to knit one strand "Continental" and the other "English". It's a bit of a learning curve but I think I'm getting there, slowly.

I think I need to find something a little more inspiring than this sampler to get my teeth into though.  I don't particularly care for the colours and it's be nice to have something to show for it at the end.

I really like Jill McGee's "My favourite Things" Infinity Scarf but not sure I'm quite ready for that yet so maybe just a little purse or something first.

Cold but beautiful

I was reading The View From The Hill where Hilltop Katie had posted some pictures of icicles in a frozen waterfall. This reminded me of some more of the pictures I took whilst on holiday the other week.

 As we drove from Exmouth down to Lostwithiel we noticed something hanging from the hedges at the side of the road which turned out to be icicles. 

As we had the heater on we hadn't even noticed it was cold enough for icicles; there was no snow and apparently it hadn't rained either. I had to stop the car and take a picture it looked so beautiful.

Further on, whilst driving over Dartmoor we stopped again to admire the line of frost edging a distant plantation and the frosted tips of the moorland grass when I noticed the tiny flags of ice clinging to the tips of the blades of grass.

It must have been so cold that the moisture in the air had frozen onto the grass and the prevailing wind had formed it into these tiny tags.

Steaming

I really want to start blogging again but alas I feel I have too much to catch up with or nothing to say. That being the case I'm going to start off with little snippets of very little and see if it comes together. 

Bear with me.

Ro and I went down to Devon a couple of weeks ago; we went to watch the Tigers play Exeter but as it's such a way to go we decided to make a week of it.   On the Saturday before the game we went to The Anchor Inn at Cockwood on the southwest side of the  Exe estuary for lunch. The pub specialises in seafood and I had Gurnard which came with it's head on had a face only a mother could love; it was very tasty though and I managed to remove the bones rather skillfully (I thought).  Ro had the salmon I believe (memory not what it was I'm afraid).

After lunch we took a stroll along the road and were lucky enough to be there as a rather lovely train steamed past.

Box weaving

Yesterday I went to Guild where one of our members gave a box weaving workshop. It's an interesting way of making bags without a loom. We'd been shown how to warp up our boxes at the previous meeting so that we'd be ready to carry on yesterday.

Much to my surprise I actually got round to getting myself prepared in advance (unusual for me) so by the end of the day I'd got on pretty well with my box. I'd decided to use rag strips rather than wool as I have quite a few worn out pairs of jeans lying about the place. I used some DK cotton that I bought a while ago from Texere Yarns for the warp.

I tore the jeans into strips about half an inch wide, the denim was quite soft and pliable as the jeans were pretty old and worn.

This is my progress so far; more pictures   when I've finished it.


If you fancy having a go yourself there are instructions on how to do it in this Interweave PDF "Bags for Beginners"

Dynamo

What a sweetie!

Colour Blending Workshop

On Saturday the theme of the Bradford Guild meeting was colour blending . Alison Daykin came to give us a talk and lead a workshop on the topic.

We'd been asked to bring a selection of fibre in the three primary colours plus black and white; an inspirational picture; our hand carders and a spinning wheel.

Being me I forgot my inspirational picture but luckily Alison had some to spare so I borrowed one of hers; a picture of the Australian outback.

The idea was to pick four or five colours from the picture and work out what proportions of the primaries we'd need to blend to get the fibre to match the colours as closely as possible.

From the picture I chose the reddish brown of the earth; the sage green of the brush; the dark green of the leaf shadows and the yellowish white stripe across the landscape.

Having chosen the colours we laid the correct proportions of the primaries onto the carders and blended the fibre 'till we had the correct shade. If the shade wasn't quite right we adjusted the quantities. These are my second lot of rolags; the first lot weren't quite right.

Once we were happy with the rolags we spun them up and roughly plied them. I was pretty pleased with the final results and when we put them all together on the table at the end it was surprising what a range of colours people had succeeded in achieving with a very limited initial palette.

Art Yarn

This is my first attempt at an art yarn. Spun it on my sister's Traditional with a jumbo flyer fitted following Jacey Boggs' instructions in her article in the Winter 2009 Spin Off.

New baby

This is my new baby; it's a Louet hatbox wheel which I bought from someone on Ravelry. The transaction wasn't without incident as I live in Yorkshire and the seller lives in Swansea; getting the wheel from one to the other took a little longer than anticipated.

Originally I decided to ask the SUMA driver who does the South Wales run to collect it for me. I found out where seller lived (not far from one of the SUMA customers) and she agreed to drop the wheel to him if he rang to let her know when he'd be at the drop. Unfortunately this didn't work out as he didn't ring her!

Grrrrrrr!

Still, she had a friend who was coming up to Sheffield the following week and he drove up to Elland where I work and dropped it off for me. Thank you very much to Mark, you're a sweetie Mark!

I tried the wheel out when I got her home on Thursday and I spun this (Shetland?? BFL??) out of a grab bag I bought from World of Wool. I decided as the ratio on the wheel is quite low (she's a direct drive) 4:1 to spin it as low twist thin 'n thin singles. I'm pleased with the result as I didn't really know what I was doing but having subsequently looked at some instructions on t'internet I found that I was doing it right. Once I'd spun it I washed it in alternate baths of hot and cold water then hung it up with an empty shampoo bottle as a (very light) weight.

Spinning this month

Spinning this month, Shetland spun whilst demonstrating on the Guild stand at the Countryside Live show last weekend.

And some merino from the grab bag I scored at World of Wool.

Botany Lap Waste

From World of Wool. Yummy!

I'm so lucky that I live near enough to just drop in after work (I was on a six / two shift today).

Not sure what some of it is but it's lovely!

Finished Bag

Well, except for lining it. That could wait for some time knowing me! Anyhow I've pictured it against the fabric I'm intending to use for the lining so you can use your imagination!

Close up of the detail. All the information about it is on my project page in Ravelry.

I'm already planning the next project. There was an open weekend at Texere this weekend, so being contrary I went to Coldspring Mill. I was hoping to get some Noro Sock or Silk Garden as I've seen some pretty nice finished projects using them. But they didn't have any Noro except that odd stringy stuff.






I did walk out with this though.










And this. Both are a cotton / hemp blend I'm thinking of a Ruana in a houndstooth weave. I believe that hemp softens up and drapes quite nicely when it's washed.

New Project

I've decided to weave another Tibetan Bag as I liked the last one I made. I wanted it to be a bit brighter than the last one so I've done a bit of stash diving and came up with this. For the warp I'm using some scarlet chenille, crimson boucle, a last little bit of green cashmerino and a tiny sliver of some lurex that a friend gave me.

The weft is the boucle and the chenille with a smidge of some fun fur as a trim. I quite like it but have to say I didn't fully think through the implications of using boucle as a warp. Now that I've got going it's not so bad but to start with I was having trouble beating the weft in. I used an afro comb as a beater for the first few inches though and now I'm okay and back to using the heddle.

Can't wait to finish it and get it sewn up, but I'm going down to Ro's this weekend and I don't think she's got room for me to take it with me. (I can see a twelve inch knitters loom in my future!)

In love with BFL

This is what the Blue Face Leicester fleece looked like when I bought it (together with free yellow flanelette pillow case).

You can see in my previous post what it looked like when I'd dyed some of it.

But this is what it looks like now I've run it through the drum carder twice. Isn't it beautiful?

To be honest I wasn't entirely convinced it was going to come out very well, it was very tightly curled and seemed a bit dense after I'd washed it. I did wonder if I'd felted it.

Once I'd picked through it though it went through the drum carder beautifully; much better than any other fleece I'd processed myself. Of course this could have something to do with a guild meeting I attended where Freyalyn showed us the correct way to use a drum carder (I'd been doing it wrong!)

I'm really looking forward to spinning this fibre, I bought some hand dyed BFL tops from Wheeldale Woolcrafts earlier in the year and loved it. I think this may be as nice as that. I can't decide whether to card it into a multicoloured batt and spin it as it comes or if I should spin the colours separately.

Suggestions?