Spinstar Creations

Last week I finished a blanket design I have been working on for, well actually I’d rather not think about how long.  Most of the knitting was completed over Christmas (not last Christmas, the one before that).  Then came the sewing up.  Or some of it, and then the whole project got put to one side.

Spring is finally in the air and a sort out of my many projects was long overdue.  The blanket resurfaced and at last it became a blanket, not a heap of squares:

It just looked a little incomplete still.

What it needed was a border.  If you ever hear me mutter those words again, steal my needles.

After many hours I am STILL picking up stitches.  It had better be worth it – and then there are many rounds to knit and after that ends to weave in.  I’m not going to dwell on my many thoughts about how to make it ‘even better’ and the prospect of knitting more squares to test that out…

Last week I posted about The Knitting Goddess competition, where my photo had been shortlisted as a possible colour theme for a set of mini-skeins.

Although I didn’t win the competition, Joy decided to produce sets of mini skeins for the nine shortlisted photos too.  Below is my photo and the mini skeins which go on sale tonight on The Knitting Goddess shop:

(Photo: The Knitting Goddess)

You may have already come across the Little Yellow Duck project – I have finally found the time to get involved after intending to do so for many months.

I am a sucker for things like this – I love the idea of leaving anonymous surprises and this project has the bonus of raising awareness for a very good cause (blood and organ donation – possibly the ultimate random act of kindness).

Despite all being made from the same pattern (Lil’Ducks) each duck seems to develop its own personality. So far I have ‘released’ half a dozen ducks into the wild:

Sunshine Suzie made her debut on a zipline at the park:

Pamela of Pagham went birdwatching at the nature reserve (I think a chap from the Environment Agency found her and then put her back for someone else to take home as she was ‘found’ twice!):

Richard of Aldwick hung out at the Post Office:

Three ducks went to visit Bognor Pier on its 150^th birthday – Dulux had donated some pink paint to the Pier Point Project (try saying that after a few drinks…) so they had names inspired by the Dulux pink paint shades – Pinkie, Candy and Sweetie:

It doesn’t end there – when ducks are found the new owner can add them to the map. I may have got just a little bit obsessive about checking that my ducklings have found a safe new home…

Another long blogging break…  but a new toy brings me back with pictures.  I recently purchased a blending board.  They are a sort of cross between giant hand carders a drum carder – you can fit more fibre on them than hand carders but they are not as heavy or large as a drum carder.

There are endless ways that you could apply fibre to the board, I picked a range of different bits of fibres in a range of different blue/green/purple colourways and added them in thin stripes:

Eventually they made a thick layer on the board:

The board comes with two dowels, like giant DPNs – I pinched the fibre between them and started rolling and pulling the fibre up, away from the board:

I experimented with making one huge fat rolag, but decided it was more manageable to make two or three smaller ones by breaking the fibre after a few rolls of the dowel:

Eventually all the fibre had been used:

I then had a load of pretty rolags to experiment with:

I chain plied the yarn and ended up with an aran-ish weight yarn, about 200 yards:

I am enjoying using this board, it does ‘what it says on the tin’ and lets you blend different fibres together.  I know my drum carder would also do the job, but the board is is just less cumbersome and less noisy to use. It is also rather addictive, all those bits of random fibre and being dusted off and combined to make multicoloured blends!

There are finally hints of spring, some blossom is appearing and flowers are determined to add splashes of colour to the bomb site that is the back garden.

In an attempt to help bring a little more colour to my world I dragged out my sewing machine and made something.  With a proper pattern and everything!

This fabric caught my eye.  It is impossible for it not to catch your eye 🙂

I have been looking for the perfect bag for a while and this free pattern for the Phoebe Bag looked like a good place to start.  I cut out the pieces and even used interfacing, I did a good job of pretending I knew what I was doing:

I came to a bit of a halt for a while when it got to the stage where the inside and outside of the bag need joining together.  I had visions of ending up with the closure flap being on the wrong side, or being stuck between the two layers of the bag.  It took about two days of picking it up, sticking more pins in and thinking very hard before I got the courage together to sew the seams.

Eventually, I ended up with a finished bag:

I even managed to add a pocket inside and a clip on a ribbon so that I don’t lose my keys in the bottom of the bag:

My local fabric shop has a sale on this weekend, so having got this far with my sewing machine I may see if there is any other fabric that tempts me.

The obsession with squares is continuing – too many ideas and not enough knitting time is, as always, a problem.

I have just about overcome my dislike of garter stitch.   Somehow it now seems very squishy and just right for knitting squares.  I keep looking at sewn quilts and seeing all sorts of possibilities for making something similar out of wool. These squares

will hopefully develop into a blanket something like this:

Yes, I’m cheating, I have done a bodgy copy and paste job, instead of lots of knitting, but it gives you an idea 🙂

I’ve also been experimenting with stripes, I have an idea for a baby blanket with this sort of stripe running through it:

Not every square works out so well, I have a pile of pink, white and black shapes which are definitely NOT square at all, but I’m still working on them.

Somehow six months has slipped by since I last posted.  Crafting has become more difficult as the various bits of my body conspire against me, but I made something very simple recently that greatly pleased me.

My daughter has reached the age where she ‘cannot live’ without a mobile phone.  Possibly she will have to be operated upon to remove it from her person at some point…  She had her eye on a rainbow coloured phone sock – which cost about £6.  The miser in me came to the fore, no way was I going to see her spend money on that when I could make one!

I had read this post about the problem of ‘icky dots’ when you change colours in knitting.  It struck a chord with me!  When colour changes look like this:

with all the mixed bumps of colours I just can’t cope with the untidiness of it all.  OCD?  Me? (This is the inside of the finished phone case – the outside is beautiful by comparison!)

As TECHknitting suggests, the solution is really very simple.  If you are knitting ribbing and change colour, you get ‘icky dots’ when you make purl stitches .  So if you don’t want them, don’t purl, knit instead.

For my project, I was using a twisted rib – K1tbl, P1.  When the time came to change colours, I did K1tbl, K1 for that round only.  Result?  Not an single icky bump to be seen 🙂

I think this was my fourth year of entering the handspun class at the Rare Breeds Show at the Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton, so I must have been spinning for four years and two months and had my Ladybug wheel for nearly four years – it seems a long time since I started spinning!

I had all sorts of plans for projects, but in the end I only entered two classes this year – but both projects attracted a rosette, and the white wool skein won First Prize and Reserve Champion (and a massive £5 in prize money)!

I was going to add some more detail to the label about yardage/weight of the skein, but when I weighed it on my digital scales it came in at a massive 6g – certainly under the required limit of 50g – and I felt such a tiny weight made it look like I hadn’t bothered to spin enough!!

I finished the spiral project I blogged about last time and turned it into a cushion – that attracted a sixth place rosette.

At least the weather was much kinder this year – a gloriously sunny day, instead of last year’s mud-bath.  I will try and start planning projects earlier this year – I keep hoping to produce a huge circular shawl, but finishing it might be a lengthy process!

I have had an idea in my head for a long time about a rainbow coloured spiral.  Finally I have managed an attempt at it, using the Hilltop Cloud fibre I spun a couple of months ago – I am quite pleased with it, but can see lots more variations on this theme, perhaps with a wider spiral of colours and a thin line of black?

I’m now spinning up more black shetland fibre in the hope that I can make a plain black circle, join them together and make a cushion cover.  It’s all rare breed fibre so, if it gets finished in time, it might become an entry for the Rare Breeds Show this year.

I recently acquired a flick carder.  I have now got a pretty good selection of tools – hand carders, drum carder and mini combs.  I bought a Jacob fleece last year and have washed and combed some of it.  I looked at again and managed to wash and dry some more locks (which with the summer we’re having so far this year is quite an achievement)!

I am not particularly good at washing fleece, but there were some white locks which managed to survive my processing attempts without turning into a mangled mess.  I had planned to comb them to spin a skein for the local spinning show (it will probably be my only entry this year – so many plans that have fallen by the wayside over the last year).  Instead,  I tried out my new flick carder.  I found that bravery and a firm hand was the key to success and ended up with a small bag of fluffy white fibre (and plenty of waste and vegetation).

I am aiming to spin a very fine yarn.  Earlier in the year I had worked on fine spinning on my Ladybug, but that is still set up with the bulky flyer for some art yarn experiment I started a while ago, so I went back to basics with my tiny little turkish spindle:

It’s a long time since I used a spindle, but it came back to me.  The tiny spindle is great for getting a fine yarn – it just keeps spinning and spinning.  I’m not quite sure how I will go about plying from two balls of singles yet, but I’ll worry about that another day!