Tag Archives: handspun

Lovely locks

It’s that time of year again, the Rare Breeds show at the Weald and Downland Museum is coming round again.  I think it must be six years since my first entry, which was made using a spindle created from a CD and a chopstick!


I have one project well underway, but I’m hoping to get a skein of polwarth ready to enter as well.  I bought a small amount of locks a few months back, have washed them and started flick carding them.  They were not really dirty to start with, but a gentle soak and rinse made the locks look like something out of a washing powder advert!

In attempt to keep my hands from complaining too much about overuse, I am swapping between carding and spinning.  Spinning this fleece is a pleasure, I must remember to take my time plying as that is where I tend to get impatient and it all goes horribly wrong…

 

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Rare Breeds Show 2011

My entries for the Rare and Traditional Breeds show at the Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton, which takes place tomorrow, are finally all ready to roll.  Most have been ready for a while, they just needed labelling up and skeining nicely.  I was shocked to find how much energy just doing something that simple took, it looks like a very slow journey back to being the old me 😦

Here are some photos of three of the skeins of yarn – the entry form says ‘neatly wound’ but I couldn’t quite figure out how that would apply to tailspun locks!

Rare Breeds Show 2011 - Skeins close up

Annis

This project made me very happy!

The fibre was my favourite colour, I bought it on a rare day out at Unravel, it was pleasant to spin, satisfying to knit and taught me how to add beads.  It’s a free pattern, so if you want an Annis of your very own pop over here to Knitty!  Don’t be put off by the joy of casting on 360-odd stitches to start with, just add in lots of stitch markers and, honestly, after the first few rows of lace it just whizzes along.

And then there were three…

The third pair of mittens are complete:

These were a scaled down version of this pattern:  http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/nalu-mitts.  Now I need to find something else to create, the Christmas projects are at an end!

Warm and toasty

My first project using a batt I created is now finished:

I made three batts of various orange/rust/gold/brown shades of merino blended with some copper coloured trilobal nylon.  Each batt has a slightly different style – one was layered, one was randomly blended and the other graduated from dark to light across the batt.  Each batt became a single and resulted in a worsted-ish three ply yarn. 

The colours lent themselves well to the Candle Flame cowl (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/candle-flame-cowl) – I managed to complete two and a half repeats of the pattern and squish in a couple of purl rows and end up with a yard or two of yarn left over – result!

Pop!

The yarn is now a hat…  After hunting through the pattern pages on Ravelry I found Pop! I kept weighing the hat and the yarn so I could get as many repeats of the pattern done as possible – the pattern suggests 12 and I managed 7 so it’s not as slouchy as the original. 

You can see the colour changes in this picture – I think I will experiment again with graduating colour through the singles, maybe the next four ply project?