Another hobby loomin?

I’m well known for going to our guild on the bus and the bus drivers are quite used to Wikkidknitter and myself carting our wheels around to various venues. In fact we have often joked about spinning on the tram here in Nottingham.

So knowing that I have to negotiate steps and door, why do I always come back from guild meeting with more than I take?? This happens so often that I tend to take an empty bag for the odd fleece that might come my way.

However, at the last meeting I turned up with two wheels fully expecting to leave empty handed as the herring wheel was going on to a new home. But I still managed to come home with a loom!! It was an old inkle loom, looking rather dirty and handmade with an abandoned piece of work on it where someone had tried to weave and failed.

After giving it a quick clean and disposing of the rough string heddles I gave it a go. Took a few experiments to get the hang of it and using an old plastic ruler as a beater didn’t really help but I think I am getting there now especially as I have found that an old heavy letter opener from my day job makes a fine beater.

My first few attempts were.. Er.. Interesting but I soon got the hang of it but I am finding the edges a bit of a challenge to keep neat.

Locating a pattern generator on the Internet helped in placing the colours but I really want to try the pickup method to give me more scope for pattern design.

Any advice on the best threads to use etc would be appreciated.thanks.

Ist Birthday party

I nearly missed the party, in fact we should have been in France but problems with the bike meant that I had an hour or so to spare on the first Saturday in September to help celebrate the shops first birthday.

For those of you that are not regular readers, I am one of the partners in a knitting shop called Knit Nottingham and we opened a year ago. The shop has grown over the last year and we are now on line with knitting yarn, hand spun yarn and accessories including drop spindles listed for sale. This is mainly due to the hard work of Eleanor, the shop manager. I have no idea where she gets the energy from to put in the hours that she does!!!

As I work full time elsewhere, my role has been very much one of giving what support I can from attending craft fairs,

teaching the occasional workshop

writing the odd blog post

taking part in charity fund raisers

and counting stock.

Maybe one day this will be my main job, but for the time being I'm loving being involved with this enterprise.








So due to the bike mishap I was able to deliver some chocolates to the shop and even have my photo taken with the other partners ( well nearly all of them) but was soon dragged away by a phone call to  say that things were OK and we were going to head south to catch a ferry.....more of that story in a later post.

Hi, I've been a bit busy but the bad news is that I'm BACK :-)

Hi,life sort of overtook everything for a bit so the next few posts are going to be a bit of a random mix of holiday and craft.
Do you remember me saying that I wanted a new camera a few months ago? well I ended up with a Canon powershot SX220 HS which I am just getting to grips with and having a bit of fun with. So this post is going to to be short on the writing but big on photos shot through glass at an aqaurium in Cornwall. I will explain why Cornwall and not France in the next few days.

So here we have pretty fish...............and the odd other water lovin creature.

I am liking this camera and it's nice and compact :-) what do you think ?