Tag: blue faced leicester

One, Two, Three, Four!

Harriette has been complaining that she’s not been doing any modelling work. In fact it’s so long since she last modelled anything that she’s forgotten when she last did some. She’s currently stood in my study with some hand-dyed skeins of yarn draped around her and she says that I should either do something with them or put them away as she’s not a hat stand (technically she’s a clothes stand – shush, best not tell her).

Sadly I didn’t think to cater to Harriette’s aspirations when taking pictures of my first object. I think I was too busy making patterns with it! It’s a scarf and I finished it in the run up to Christmas.

scarf-folds

scarf-side

scarf-roll

scarf-ends

The yarn is handspun blue faced Leicester and bamboo that I carded into batts to make a gradient coreless core-spun yarn.

Over the Christmas/New Year period I finished plying some polworth yarn. I threaded both plies with beads and used the intermittent coils technique I learnt on Sarah Anderson’s course. My coils improved as I went along (my hands got better at controlling and moving the twist and coordinating with my feet!) but when I do another intermittent coiled yarn I’ll put more twist into the singles. I haven’t yet decided on a destination for this, or what technique I’ll use for it.

coils

During the summer I spun up some alpaca and bfl. In October I started spinning up some merino and seacell and last week I finally finished the spinning and started plying them together. Even at the last moment I wasn’t sure that plying them together was the thing to do, but as the colours have gone onto the bobbin I’ve been pleased with the result. I’m surprised that two very strongly coloured singles are making a paler more subtle plied yarn. I’m interested to see what the finished skeins will be like.

basket

abms-plying

Finally, I’m still working on the knitted shawl it’s been quite a few places with me, including a beach at the end of October while the children dug big holes in the sand.

sandyshawl

While at the beach I took the opportunity of going for an early morning walk and taking some photos. Here’s sun, sea and sand just after dawn:

sun and sea

sandysun

Harriette is really keen that I finish the shawl soon, so we can go outside for a bit and get some nice photos that include her. She’s hoping to see some daffodils.

It’s been a while!

runs a finger through the dust on the blog heading

Sorry about that!

fetches a feather duster and twirls it in the corners… sneezes!

Since we last spoke there’s been the Tour de France (and the much more interesting Tour de Fleece), I’ve attended two spinning workshops and been spinning, knitting, weaving, attempting to prevent the garden turning into a very wild place, running a code club and generally trying to keep up with two young children…

watches as some fluff bunnies bounce, like tumbleweed, across the bottom of the blog

I hope to catch up on some of that in future blog posts, in the meantime I’d like to show you what I’m currently working on.

shawl

It’s my first lace shawl, and I’m knitting it with my own handspun yarn.  Now, I have to admit that I couldn’t remember what fibre this was, but looking back at my blog, it appears to be some Blue Faced Leicester I dyed and spun on my Ashford wheel.  I’d been knitting for a few days when I realised that I’d Navaho plied it (I was wondering why the colours had remained separate)!

The pattern is True Romance Shawl by Juju Vail which was in Mollie Makes a few months ago.

shawl-edge

I’ve really enjoyed knitting it so far.  I got a huge buzz of satisfaction from fixing a mistake, two rows after I made it, without needing to tink back.  I’d skipped a yarn-over then added one at random a few stitches later.  I’d also made the yarn-over on the wrong side of my marker for the centre stitch (which added to the confusion and may have contributed to the mistake in the first place).  Anyway, with the aid of a crochet hook I created a new yarn-over and dropped the extra one, and after a couple of rows the mistake was invisible!  The lace is lovely and simple to work, but defies the placing of markers to make counting easier.

lace-close

jumps as a HUGE spider runs across the blog

Wow, that really was a big spider!  Did you see it?  I should probably go and get a glass and some cardboard and pop it outside, but I think I’ll leave it as a guard spider to scare the hackers who are constantly trying to discover my password.  Good luck to them I say! Most of the time I can’t remember it myself!

Anyway, Harriette my assistant is delighted I’m writing this blog post and is encouraging me to finish the shawl quickly so she can model it before it gets too cold and wet for a photoshoot in the garden!

So, TTFN until next time (and I promise I’ll try and come back much sooner).

The Garden and Dyeing

I got back from all the time away in August to find the neglected garden was doing very well with brambles, that had acquired triffid like proportions, creeping, crawling and scrambling over and through everything.  One bramble had sent a branch soaring upwards, through the crab apple tree (at about 8ft high) and was just touching the ground on the other side.  The lawn had almost totally disappeared.  So, I’ve been hacking (loppers are a girl’s best friend), shredding and mowing to slowly return order to a large proportion of the garden.  There is still much to be done, but today I bought a wide variety of spring bulbs and some winter violas to plant in the recently cleared herb bed.  I’m looking forward to the garden being a real treat in the spring.

About half of the garden has been neglected for a much longer time and is under a frightening scramble of brambles.  I’ve been ignoring this and will continue to do so until I have the rest under control.  I then have plans to work on it over the autumn and winter and eventually to plant a range of fruit trees to make a tiny orchard.

Despite all the gardening I managed to do some dyeing one evening last week.  I dyed up some BFL tops and BFL, kid mohair and Wensleydale fleece.  I did all the dyeing in the oven in some large roasting pans.  The pans fit (just) two at a time in the oven and mean that I can dye four batches of fibre in one session.

dyeing

The fleece, despite the warm weather, took two whole days to dry on the line.  I hang the fleece in net laundry bags, but I shall have to find a much better way to dry it in the future.  The BFL top was completely dry, fluffy and airy after just a day.

BFL-top 

I’ve started using the mohair, and it’s the first time I’ve used this fibre.  Initially I thought I’d felted it, as it was very difficult to tease apart the locks, but, I think it had compacted during the dyeing.  The mohair doesn’t have the elasticity or bounce of wool and I hadn’t understood how it would behave.

mohair

I’m currently teasing the mohair apart and carding it with hand-cards to get fluffy coloured clouds.  I have a plan, but that shall be in my next post…

Crepe Yarn in Progress

It’s been a while since I last made a blog post.  Various reasons, including the continued poor weather.  Even though it’s now March and the crocuses and the early daffodils are up, we are still having cold, snowy, frosty and grey days.  Sadly this makes taking pictures tricky.  However, the sun finally came out briefly yesterday afternoon, so I’ve been able to take pictures of work in progress.

A few weeks ago I received a lovely spinning book for my birthday.  It’s The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs by Sarah Anderson:

spinners_book_yarn_design

Yes, I did just grab that image from the preview on Amazon’s site.

The book’s absolutely brilliant.  Full of inspiring techniques and ideas for yarn constructions I’ve not come across before.  I love the clear diagrams that show the construction of a yarn at a glance.  My first project inspired by this is a 3 ply yarn, with a construction similar to a cabled yarn.  It’s called a Crepe yarn.  2 singles are spun in one direction, then plied.  Then a second single is spun in the plied direction and plied with the original 2 ply.  Are you still following?  No? The “at a glance” diagram would really help here – which is one reason the book is so brilliant.

I’m spinning this with a thick single from my dyed BFL (the pinky/orange one), here it is a few weeks ago:

and two thin singles of natural white Shetland.  I was aiming at a Bubble or Rickrack Crepe yarn, but I don’t think there’s enough difference in the thickness of the singles.  At the two ply stage I have two almost full bobbins of yarn.  However, I don’t have enough bobbins for the wheel I’m using for this spinning, so have wound the 2-ply off into skeins:

crepe-2-ply

As there’s a lot of unbalanced twist in this 2-ply, the skeins are a little like super-scrunchies.  I’m sure there are good reasons not to handle the yarn-in-progress in this way, but I’m afraid I don’t know them (a little knowledge at this stage may be a dangerous thing).  At the moment I’m working on the second white single.  When I ply I’ll put each skein onto my swift and ply from the swift and a bobbin.  I’ve not done this before!  It could all turn into a huge tangle of wild yarn!