Spinning Again

I got my spinning wheel out last week. It’s been quite some time since I did any spinning because my schedule has gotten a bit hectic. I had a bit of a craving to spin though.

I finished what I had started – not good practice to leave singles for as long as I did but I didn’t have too many issues with it ( as long as you don’t look too close).

The fibre is Frog Prince roving from hilltopcloud – it’s a blend of BFL, merino, bamboo and sparkle. Using my new WPI tool from hilltopcloud, it’s about 10 wpi, which makes it worsted weight. It’s 3 plied. There’s about 172m, so probably enough for a hat.

I’ve started another lot of fibre. This one is from Countess Ablaze.It’s BFL and I got it quite some time ago.

I hoping to make this into a 3ply fingering weight yarn. There’s about 164g of fibre, so that should be plenty. I’m not sure at the moment whether I’m just going to go with the flow or navajo ply it. I’m just going to spin the singles first then decide.

Goodies

Oh dear, look at that. More wool came home with me…and quite a lot of it this time.

I managed to bring 17 balls of the new Rowan Fazed Tweed home. It’s a chunky weight yarn and it’s very soft with some lovely colours in the range. I did have a difficulty picking my favourite colour but thought I’d go with something classic and went with black.

The plan at the moment is to make the Plum Creek Jumper by Sarah Hatton, which I’ve been eyeing for awhile and thought the yarn and pattern would make a nice combination.

I did make another purchase recently. It’s this nifty little thing from Hilltopcloud.

It’s a wrap per inch (wpi) tool with a difference. It’s more of a useful tool for a spinner rather than a knitter but there are times that you don’t know what thickness the yarn is as a knitter too. 

Normally, you wrap the yarn around an inch space and see how many wraps there are. You can still do that on this but you can lay the yarn across the lines at the bottom to see which it fits in best. This works really well.

Here’s my new Fazed Tweed laid across the 8 line, a quick look at the very handy chart at the top tells me it’s on the border of Aran/Chunky. The other thing that I love is that the chart is on the tool, so you won’t lose it or have to go and look it up on the computer. Money well spent.

Woolfest Haul 2013

Another year at Woolfest and it was just as fantastic. Here are links to previous years 2011 and 2012. It seemed busier this year.

 I went with the intention of buying no spinning fibre at all, as I had a lot bought me at Christmas, but.... Well, hilltopcloud fibre is so gorgeous, it just "had" to be bought. There was a beautiful blue and orange batt and some Southdown dyed in a gradient. Southdown is meant to be a fantastic fibre for socks and I've been wanting to try it for awhile. I love how the fibre was presented it looked like a fluffy octopus!

Eden Cottage Yarns and a mini skein set from Natural Dye Studio

Cute little sheep from Hestascene. Need to think of an appropriate name for her.

Gorgeous buttons from Textile Garden

Embroidery silks from Natalie Fergie aka Yarn Yard. The orange 4ply in the top picture is from her too.

This is what I got most excited about. It's a Lilly Brush which before the show I thought was only available from the US at super high postage rates, so I didn't think I'd be able to get one easily. Tall Yarns have them in stock at the moment. Basically it's a de-piller and lint remover and it's fab.

Recycled Wedding Vases

For my wedding all the table centre pieces were little hurricane lamp style vases filled with roses. I gave most of them away after the wedding to the guests but I kept two for myself. They'd been kicking around and not getting used. So I decided to decorate them with glass paints so they could be used for either vases or decorative candle holders. I made these awhile ago and didn't share them.

The glass paint was a little tricky to master. It worked better with smaller areas to paint, as the brush strokes were very obvious. Plus, I didn't have a simple way to draw directly onto the glass. You can draw on paper and put this inside the glass but this didn't appeal. So I did some freehand painting, which was very interesting and quite cathartic.

The first is a meandering vine with little flowers.

The second is meant to be meadow flowers. The blue flowers are my version of little cornflowers and the pink ones are a (very) artistic impression of a daisy.

On a more fibre related note, I won a blog competition last week - the blog was HilltopCloud's The View from the Hill. I had a very exciting thud on the doormat and received the latest copy of the YarnMaker. The magazine contains a pattern created by Katie of HilltopCloud, which is stunning and a brilliant use of tailspun yarn. I've been meaning to try this magazine for awhile and I'm very impressed with the quality of it and all the interesting articles too.