Spinstar Creations

I’ve bought YarnMaker from the first edition and this Christmas my Dad kindly bought me an annual subscription.  There are always competitions but I tend to forget to enter them.

In the last edition the competition was for a two-night holiday in one of the cottages owned by Wingham Wool Work.  Which, of course, just happens to be very close to their enormous fibre mountain and provides a great opportunity for sampling and purchasing 🙂

I was lucky enough to win the competition, so will be off to Yorkshire later in the year, something I am really looking forward to.  I live on the south coast, so it’s a long way to go – about 250 miles away.  I imagine that we will make a longer family holiday of it, either booking more days at the cottage or stopping elsewhere en route and doing a grand tour.

Things are looking up for a change!

My poor old craft blog has been rather quiet, whilst my body is refusing to provide me with enough energy to do very much beyond the essentials for home and work.  But, I have been doing a few bits and pieces over the past couple of months, so here’s a little update.

In a spirit of optimism I have been buying materials that I can look forward to making full use of in the (hopefully) not too distant future.  I bought a Jacob fleece last year and added some Valkyrie combs from The Whorl’s End to my tool cupboard to process the fleece – they are fearsome looking things:

I combed some of the Jacob fleece and they did a great job of detangling the fibres, loads of bugs and leaves fell out (I didn’t realise quite how much mess it would make, next time I will put something on the floor underneath combs) and it blended the colours well.

I used the combed fibres to experiment with some fine spinning.  I would like to make a circular shawl using laceweight yarn, but that project might be a while away yet. I only knitted up a tiny amount, but I was pleased with it:

I accidentally bought a 20″ Ashford Knitter’s loom and stand.  It was too good a bargain to pass by and weaving puts less pressure on knee and hand joints so I could sort of justify it to myself.  I have completed one project on it so far, not particularly exciting to look at as I just grabbed some plain coloured yarn to see how it worked.  As always, the first project taught me quite a few things to avoid in future, but it resulted in a functional scarf:

I am hoping to still be able to enter something into the annual show at the Weald and Downland Museum this year.  I bought this shetland/silk blend fibre from Hilltop Cloud and have grand plans for it.  I am a sucker  for rainbow blends and have had a spiral pattern in my head for a couple of years and this looks like the perfect fibre to use for it:

And finally, there is this creation:

Her name is Valentina, and it’s a long story… but she made someone smile which is what it’s all about really, isn’t it?

It’s been a while since my last blog post – several months in fact. I’m hoping that 2012 will bring about a return to more regular craft blogging, but the reason for the lack of posts recently is ill-health.  I won’t bore you with the details, but after eight months of feeling decidedly off-colour it seems likely that I have Coeliac Disease.  I’ve started another blog to record my journey into the gluten-free world that should bring me back to normality.

Back in the world of knitting, here’s a photo of a rather cute creature who came off my needles this Christmas:

If you haven’t met one before, this is a Pookie (pattern here).  Every home should have one!

I’m not very good with fleece.  When I’ve washed, carded and spun fleece in the past, more often than not it has ended in lumps, bumps and matted nastiness.

Not this time…  All the stuff about lock preservation that I had read really fell into place, mostly because the fleece itself was so lovely!  I bought 500g of Gotland fleece in three different shades of grey from Emma Boyles of Well Manor Farm.

Even before I washed it, I could see that there was almost no vegetable matter at all and I almost had an urge to spin it without washing.

It didn’t take much washing, a soak in hot water, one in soapy water and two rinses.  It still looked, as my daughter pointed out, like an old lady’s grey haired curly wig, even when drying on top of the woodburner.

I handcarded the fleece and it just wanted to be spun into a very fine yarn.

I tried each of the three different shades of grey – this sample is the darkest of the shades of grey:

I washed, carded and spun all the pale grey fleece and, having enjoyed making Annis earlier this year, tackled another of Susannah IC’s designs ‘Little Leaves’.  AwesomeEle on Ravelry kindly gave me this pattern and I was determined to do it justice – even though it mean another 300+ stitches to cast on and adding about 200 beads (which I did with a tiny crochet hook this time round)!

Having bodged my purple/aqua batts into yarn I didn’t want to set it aside (as happens with so many of my skeins…) I was keen to see how the colour graduation worked when made up into something.

There wasn’t a great length of yarn and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it… Lorrie’s swirly artwork came to mind again, so a spiralled piece of crochet came into being:

I’ve had another spiralling rainbow crochet design in my mind since last autumn, but I need to dye some fibre and I need the weather to improve first.  I also need to think about the amounts of fibre to be dyed – this batt had pretty equal amounts of each colour, but as the spirals increase in size so the colour ends up in thinner and thinner sections.  Just need more hours in the day!

I’ve just finished using all the fibrey goodies that I received in the UK Spinners’ Secret Santa on Ravelry.  First the pictures:

Three ply Falkland Fibre – Summer Cobbler colourway

Silk Hankies/Falkland 2 ply

The Falkland fibre spun beautifully evenly and very thinly, which I was really pleased with – I want to spin and knit something in a laceweight yarn but haven’t achieved the consistency in spinning to do so yet, so this was a big step forward.  I ended up with uneven amounts on the bobbins, so got 330 yds of 18 wpi three ply and two bobbins with a fair bit still to use! 

I plied one bobbin with the silk and navajo plied the other.  I got better at using the hankies as Iwent along but it was still rather lumpy and bumpy in places.  The resulting yarn is very light and floaty.  I don’t really like barber-pole yarn, but would try plying silk and something in the future with a closer colour match, maybe 2 plies of fibre and 1 of silk.

Thank you again Secret Santa, whoever you were – I got a lot out of your gift!

I’ve been having a sort out.  It’s amazing the stuff that accumulates – sometimes I think it multiplies when I’m not looking.  I bought some plastic storage containers and started sorting out the small stuff:

Buttons and Ribbons

Cotton Reels

Short knitting needles

Long knitting needles

I wasn’t kidding you about the teddy bear noses – well, they are mixed in with teddy bear eyes, joints and squeakers:

Some of these goodies belonged to my gran.  I did manage to part with some of her cards with thread to darn my stockings with, I’ve not got much call for that these days!  I did find this though – it’s tiny but still intricately marked:

It is a bit rusty and looks like a crochet hook, but it is so tiny! 

Any idea what it’s for?  Crocheting with thread maybe?