I have started a new knitting blog on blogger so that I can link it to rss feeds on Ravelry and Facebook.  visit it at Create With Fibre blog.

As some of you will know, I was away all of last week teaching spinning at the Association of Weavers Spinners & Dyers Summer School.  It was wonderful to have a Summer School in Scotland after a gap of many years.  In fact I believe the last one was in Galashiels in 1997.  I remember because I presented my Certificate of Achievement in Handspinning at that one. 

We were all very grateful to Margaret and Doreen for volunteering to organise a summer school in Scotland or it would never have happened.

I enjoyed the experience of teaching there very much, and what a great bunch of people there were in the class - wonderful in fact.  I have come home inspired with my own work and spent the last couple of days hand spinning fine cashmere yarn long draw. Ah that brings back memories!  I used to contract spin cashgora ('reject' cashmere and with fibres a few microns thicker than the real thing) by the bin bag full for Stephane Jaeger Knitwear.  It has taken me this long to get around to spinning it again and to be able to see it as a luxury fibre!

Since we are on the topic of luxury fibres, I have also spun Musk Ox (quivut) by the bin bag.  A friend of a friend worked in the Arctic circle collected five bin bags full of it.  I spun it for him.  Again it has been hard to think of it as a luxury fibre since then.  However it is wonderful stuff if you can afford enough of it to do anything with.


We are off to spin some more at Broughton Spinners Gathering on Saturday and I hope I can fit my Timbertops chair wheel in the car this time so I can keep on spinning the Chinese cashmere!

14 wheels ready to go...             and going...

         
here is my recently finished broomstick crochet baby blanket.  Crochet is really taking off at the moment and I am teaching a lot of crochet workshops this year. 
   
I am also working on an article on Broomstick Crochet at the moment which will hopefully be out in the Autumn.

I have a Creative Crochet weekend workshop at Higham Hall which is worth looking out for.   It is from Fri 21st to Sun 23rd October 2011.

Broomstick crochet baby blanket.

I am having a bit of a sale due to lack of space and have hand dyed fat quarters for quilting at five for £5.00, plus £1.50 postage.  They are usually five for £10.  It is pot luck but I will give a nice selection.

My eBay shop, Create With Fibre is now up and running too.
Roll on the Weavers, Spinners & Dyers Summer School as my house is full of fibre for the students!

the spinning book has gone to the publishers - phew- it is being published hopefully in November 2011 by the Low Impact Living Initiative (LILI). 

Meanwhile, the knitting is not finished...the Mystery Blanket continues and is well over due, but only four squares and the border to go.  I think on reflection I do not like being told what to do, and having a deadline for a blanket is just not my thing.  I have enjoyed it more since the supposed completion date passed.  what is the point in getting stressed about knitting?  The other problem is that it would be easy to do no other knitting except the blanket for the whole year, and what fun is that?

Someone at my spinning group knitted some easter chickens.  The chicks had knitting lace as feathers and a creme egg inside them.  I bought one, and soon afterwards found myself at a knitting group with no knitting to do.  I had planned to knit a square for my rather overdue Debbie Abrahams Mystery Blanket but brought the wrong knitting needles.  In our communal group knitting stash was some lace I had donated, so I un-donated it again and used some scrap wool to begin knitting a chicken. 
Instead of the knitting lace, I was using brown stretchy knicker lace, and I cut holes up the centre of it with scissors.  it worked just like knitting lace - well okay mine is a hen rather than a chick, given the brown lace.
That lace was actually rescued from a skip by a friend when a lace factory closed down about ten years ago and I think we all still have a big ball of it.  I always knew it would come in handy...
anyway my chicken/hen turned out a different shape but looked not too bad once I had sewn a tail on it.  I didn't have a pattern so am quite pleased with the result.  It is just right for an egg cosy. 
I gave the chicken to my grand daughter and the hen to my daughter.  Actually I gave the chicken to hubby to start with but he promptly ate the egg and returned it!

I am spending the weekend washing, carding and spinning wool.  Yummy.

this is a good time of year to wash fleeces as it means they can dry outside.

due to the qualities of wool that has not been commercially scoured, even when the oil is washed out it dries really quickly.  it is quite common for a fleece to be dry after a few hours outside is Scottish sun.

As some of you will know, I spin to order, so most of the spinning I do is for other people.  That suits me fine as I could never keep up with all the spinning I want to do, and would end up with an awful lot of knitwear.  Not many people do it, but I like it.  Over the last fifteen years I have spun many things:

Cashgora (really yummy this).  I spun it for years for a woman with a spinning business in Orkney.

Musk Ox - a story here.  It is a highly sought after fibre by spinners and knitters alike.  I had 5 sacks of it to spin for someone else!  He was an arctic explorer and collected it from rocks etc over a period of time.  It was a dream to spin.  You would need to be in the arctic to be able to wear a jumper made from pure musk ox, as it is a very warm fibre.

All kinds of wool from sheep.

Mohair.  A much nicer yarn when you spin your own.  It is not fluffy and prickly like the commercial stuff, but a smooth, shiny and durable yarn which is very good for knitwear and makes great socks.  Kid mohair hand spun is suitable for even the tiniest baby.

what I have not spun - ever - is dog hair because I don't like the smell.  Sheep's wool I could (and do ) bury my face in and inhale the lovely aroma.  Washed fleece of course.  That smell is what makes many of us want to learn to spin.

2nd August 2009

I have been spinning some very nice Merino and Silk blended tops purchased from http://www.scottishfibres.co.uk.  this was sparked off by my spinning and weaving guild's recent retreat. 
A friend bought some Noro thick singles yarn in merino and silk.  it had several colours in it and was £9.50 per 100g. 
I decided to copy it and my own version cost just£3.50.  I am now knitting a cardigan with it using a chevron pattern, which my friend Julie provided.  It is a common pattern so you may have it, but don't you know it is just never to hand when you need it...so to save you the bother look on the 'free stuff' page and the pattern is yours.

over the last couple of months I have made:
 a wrapover cardigan in multi coloured hand spun merino super wash yarn for my 2 year old grand daughter
a pair of cotton socks, from charity shop yarn at 50p a ball in a kind of minty green which I over dyed
a knitting bag from a thick slub yarn which is dyed in dark blue shades.  It has huge bobbles on it and is lined with red satin.

lots of pairs of those knitted wire earrings that I sell on the website. I also sell these in a couple of local galleries and a craft shop. 
I currently have some items in an exhibition of Galloway Craft Guild members in Castle Douglas, Dumfries & Galloway, in the gallery next to the library (car park at top of high street).

I have just had another batch of my booklets printed and sales are brisk. 
They are:
'Natural Dyeing' and 'spinning fancy Yarns' and it is lovely to see how well they are doing.

I am planning another one at the moment.  However the largest task at present is to spin all the fleece that people want spinning.  Yummy task though...