craftiness abounds

 In-between the knitting and spinning , I have been busy playing with different things. We had a cross stitch session in the local cafe to make mothers day cards.

Followed by a lace making day with the demo pillows out for people to try, so busy that I forgot to take a photo but here is the progress on my own lace.

then I took my inkle loom down to the cafe to show how I make ukulele straps.

and even made it to a local guild meeting.

My cross stitch progress has been slow but I'm working on the big black thing whenever I get chance.

That about it craft wise, I'm trying to avoid the temptation of buying more fleece at the moment ! 

I've had it with knitting !!

 Just joking, I'm taking a break simply because I'm running out of yarn so the next couple of weeks will be focused on spinning.

My knitting tally for the last two months is seven hats, five pair of mitts and four head bands, I still have plenty of oddments for headbands and mitts but I'm running really short of skeins for hats.

        (Sorry, terrible photo, if I close the blind, it doesn't make much difference this time of year)

I also want to put some time into the big red thing and try and get it finished as I'm aching to start a new project.

I've had this on my wish list for ever but its really big, however I'm really (much to my surprise) enjoying stitching on 18 ct aida at the moment and when I spotted that it was half price recently, I grabbed a piece big enough. I just need to decide on the thread colour as it is charted in this magazine using a burnt umbre but traditionally it would be stitched in black. I suspect that this will be a 10-year project haha.

If you are unfamiliar with this magazine, it is no longer published but you can buy a cd containing all the published issues. It's a mixture of patterns and needlework history and the cd contains 80 issues.

I've made a start on the spinning, one skein of mixed breeds i.e. all the odds and ends from my spinning where I've prepped the fibre but there is a lot less than 100gm left to spin.

So, for now, I'll pop the kettle on, get some housework done, finish last weeks cross stitch square then get the fleece done.

Have a great week xx

Quick crafty update

 Hi

Just a quick craft update before the New Year arrives, the craft destash finally amounted to 7 carrier bags full which will be donated to a playgroup/afterschool club.

I finished the hat which I was knitting whilst away in the van, using my most recently spun yarn. My mannequin head is a bit small especially as she doesn't have any hair and this is really a mans hat.

A couple of months ago I purchased some 20 count gridded Aida (20stitches to the inch) as I had never used it before and was a little curious about it.

I wasn't too sure about it but the instructions said that wash at 60 degrees and the lines disappear, so I did just that.

Please excuse the bad lighting, the lines did disappear and the fabric became a lot whiter and denser. I'm now stitching a small design just to experiment with plus I'm feeling like I need to stitch in something other than black or red for a while. Each square is 10 stitches so 1/2 inch.

As for new year plans ? I've not really got many, just trying to spin down as much of my fleece stash as possible. Obviously we will try and get away as often as work allows and continue to destash the house.

Do you have any plans for 2022?

speak soon xx

craftiness in a box

 What's in the box ? 

I know some of you may already have seen this a few years ago but many of you haven't.

I'm giving a very small lacemaking demo/lesson with another lacemaker of Saturday and I'm unable to get my usual pillow into my rucksack and if I'm having a crutches day I will be stuck for carrying things. I made this pillow a number of years ago but it still does the job so I've started a 'simple' torchon strip of lace.

This gave my brain a work out, firstly I have the pricking and no instructions or number of bobbins to be used, then I had to try and remember how to do this type of lace as I usually do Bucks Point lace. Torchon is my usual go to option for a demo (it's been a while) as its easier to pick up and down between questions and as its quite angular you can point out the different stitches and direction to work in.

There are a few mistakes in the first repeat, not really mistakes, more trying to find the right fit for the pattern but I'm not worried as I probably won't do anything with it.

I've been doing a little spinning.

and a little knitting so I now have three woolly hats waiting to be soaked and blocked.

A few stitches have been added to the big red thing and the black thing :-)

I have another hat on the needles and plan to spin up some cheviot fleece later this week. I think that about sums up all my craftiness over the last couple of weeks. My diary now seems to be a heady mixture of coffee dates, dentist, and covid jab over the next few days so I will update again as soon as I get chance.

Take care xx

the days are getting colder, wool is warm :-)

 We have just two more trips planned for this year and we are keeping our fingers crossed that they can still go ahead. So, for the time being, its back to business as usual. Mittens have again been in demand and hopefully I will get all these ends sewn in tomorrow. ( day trip planned, of interest to knitters so watch for next post)

I had a simple 1x1 rib hat as car knitting last weekend and I need to do about 3 more inches before shaping the crown.

Also on the needles is the start of a fair isle beanie.

The lovely Jacob from Modern Folk Embroidery has assigned November as black sampler month, work on any sampler as long as its black. He has some amazing designs and also has a really informative you tube channel . I was lucky enough to have a long zoom conversation with him earlier this year and his knowledge of samplers is astounding. As he is Dutch, some of his collection are different to the standard English/American samplers usually seem.

Anyway, I had a look through the early issues of The Gift of Stitching. This digital magazine, is no longer in exitance but I was able to buy all 70 issues for under £30 as pdf and there are enough patterns that I like for me to justify the purchase ( plus I used birthday monies ) I found a small Quaker inspired sampler perfect for this stitch challenge. Then ,me being me, I started it early !! 

Sshhh, don't tell Jacob that I cheated haha :-)

So now I have two red things and a black thing on the go ! I'm trying to get ahead as November is also Wovember on Instagram with daily photo prompts which I will probably share on here as well. I think that it will be similar to the lace month that I did back in January? My instagram link is here and if you scroll back aways you will find a lot of daily lace photos from the beginning of the year.

Finally, I did some shopping on the Lace suppliers spotlight page again. This time its a pattern for a small piece of lace to fit into a ruler. Pattern by Sally-Anne Smiddy. I will get round to it eventually.

TDF day five, some spinning, some stitching

 Back to the Shetland / Romney, 2nd bobbin spun and both plied together.

I've now reached the point where I colour code my skeins, a loop of yarn or embroidery thread round the skein and a loop of the same colour through a punched hole in some card, breed name on card. This way I can wash them all together then label up according to the corresponding colours. Does this make sense?

Next up are a couple of bobbins of dark Jacob (different fleece to the last one ) the plan is to spin a couple more tomorrow before I go out and then ply them on Friday.

I think I told you that I had left my big cross stitch project in the van ? this means that I 'have' to start another one 😀 So here we are.

Its actually the wrong way up, not that it matters too much at the moment.

I'm heading out tomorrow, just to get out of the house for a few hours, just some shopping and maybe some coffee. I may just take one of my spindles with me and see how far I get.

Sunshine and stitches

Hi :-)

 A couple of finishes, the witch ( design from Sub Rosa see previous post ) and my black sheep design which  is my first cross stitch design attempt in over 25 years :-)

We've had 3 days of sunshine and reasonable temperatures (at the time of writing) but the weather is forecast to cool down again and possibly by the time I upload this it may even be snowing again !!However, for the time being it's forecast 21C today and I'm making the most of it by doing the washing haha.

Yesterday I went out for a walk to the post office and discovered that someone had yarn bombed the post box.

Another interesting sight was the community library. I had not walked through this area since I left work so assume that this was possibly set up during the first lockdown.

As you have probably gathered, we live in a valley, the post office is up on the hill ( more of a ridge really as it drops back down again the other side. If the weather is good you can see for miles from the post office.

The tower blocks in the distance are Nottingham city centre.

Over the Easter break, my main task is to try and match the sampler colour to the DMC ranges. I've stitched a swatch and I'm waiting for the light to be reasonable to see which is the closest. The sampler has faded in places so I'm looking for a happy medium on this.

That's it for this weeks round up, I'm publishing this a little early on Saturday rather than Monday as I've actually had something to write about!

Speak soon, xx

Bristol Sampler update

 Hi

Do you remember my post about the Bristol Sampler that had been in my family for several years? Thanks to Jacob at Modern Folk Embroidery I now know that it has been in my family since 1887 !

It appears that Elizabeth Travel was my great grandmother. More about this in a future post once I get my head around this.

I did a little spending at the Face Book bobbin lace suppliers spotlight page last week. I haven't bought any lace patterns for years and I have plenty to last me but these are rather pretty.

I have a new cross stitch on the go, this one was designed for the Projet Chiens aide aux Handicapes which I think translates as service dogs in 2008 presumably as a fund raiser and offered as a free chart in 2010.

From Monday, we are allowed to meet other people outdoor ( up to 6 people) and since the weather forecast is good for Tuesday I might venture out a little further than the local branch of Tesco :-) We still have to wait until at least 12 April for non-essential shops to open .

I even managed to make a start on the bag of cheviot ! so all in all not such a bad week.

and todays challenge is to sort this lot out double quick so I can get my laptop out for a zoom meeting as I don't have a camera with my desktop which is my general go to more most things internet.

Have a great week , speak soon xx

 This week I've been concentrating on the Quaker Sampler, I'm a little concerned that I will not have enough thread so the choice will be to leave it until after 12 April when the local needlework store reopens or us something different like dark blue  and redo the small motifs in that colour.....

A few days later.

Its about finished, I need to decide whether to put initial/date on it  but will leave that for the future. I have maybe a foot or so of six strand thread left so cutting it fine but should just be enough.

this was a free pattern on a blog Gazette 94  the blog is written in French but google will ask if you want to translate.

I've also tea dyed some of my cream coloured evenweave fabric to play with next , I still have a few yards of this so plenty to experiment with.

Hopefully my life will get back to normal soon, the paperwork is coming to an end and hopefully the lockdown will start to ease more over the next few weeks. I'm hoping to get out with my camera and start on the new project and also summon up enough strength to start once again on the craftroom destash. I may even document the sheer madness that hides behind the cupboard doors for you .

That's about it for now, take care everyone, speak soon xx

( I may even get the spinning wheel out )

 I'm really starting to feel a little more motivated to do things, not just stitch but I've started to back up the last five years of photos on my desktop and sort out the documents file ready to back up. I have a small stack of letters to reply to so that's on todays list along with some baking.

The weather is definitely colder again but the mornings and evenings are getting lighter which is really helping. I knew that my first full winter at home would be a challenge but obviously the lockdowns since November have made this one a bit more taxing.

Usually we would travel away for a weekend breaks in the winter, recharge the batteries and breath some sea/country air but obviously this hasn't happened but the date for campsites opening in England in April 12 and we are still hoping the Scotland open theirs around the same time.

I've managed some stitching this week but really not enough to post on here but I did find some old stitching from the early 90's when clearing things out. At that time I generally gave away my stitching but here are some small finished pieces.

I think my favorite is the hedgehog :-)

Next weeks challenge is to finish the Quaker piece and think about what's next. I didn't want to go too far back down the rabbit hole but I'm having a bit of fun :-)

Is it spring yet?

 The sun is shinning!! I've even had washing on the line over the  last few days. Its due to get a bit colder again this week but the last week really lifted my spirits :-)

My knitting, spinning mojo is still largely missing but I'm slowly stitching on my two main projects, The small Quaker sampler and the experiment.

The Quaker is coming along nicely and I will definitely stitch another simply because I like the regularity of the designs.

AS for the experiment, I'm about 3500 stitches in so far and its sort of beginning to take shape. I'm reluctant to reveal what it is at the moment, I'd rather wait and see if it gets more obvious.

Today I have a sore arm, the result of having the covid vaccine yesterday ( I fall into the clinically venerable group) but hopefully that will be the only discomfort.

We have made a few more plans for roadtrips later in the year and we still have festival tickets from an event that was cancelled last year so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for getting out and about even if still socially distanced by being in the van .

Also, thinking ahead about this blog, I'm considering doing a series of posts relating to the area I live in  once the stay at home order is lifted and travelling by public transport is permitted. It's just an idea in the back of my mind at the moment but there are a lot interesting places within this county to visit and photograph and it would give me the opportunity to revisit many of them. It would be a separate post to my weekly crafty type update, probably a couple of posts a month. 

Would anyone be interested in this? BTW the county in question is Nottinghamshire, in the East Midlands, UK. 

Please let me know, thanks.

Take care, speak soon xx

sometimes things just happen

 I was worried about  running out of thread for the Quaker sampler, in fact I was in the process of looking for a source of Anchor thread 161 as it was getting more obvious that the floss that I had was not enough to finish it.

Then this morning, whilst sorting through a small bag of embroidery threads ( about half a dozen full skeins in total) found in my late mothers sewing box I found this.

I guess someone's telling me that I need to finish this piece!

Speak soon xx

a little late but that's life at the moment.

 I managed to get two pairs of the long armed fingerless mitts out of my Shetland 160gm skein with 3gm to spare !! I must admit that I did think that I would run out so popped a lifeline in the 3rd one just incase I needed to have a contrasting stripe where the fingers started.

I'm now working on the third pair, shorter this time. but I did knit a hat from the mixed left over fibre skeins :-)

The new embroidery flosses have been sort of sorted. I've grabbed the colours that I need for my project but one seems to be missing. Given that there are so many, I've probably miss-sorted it but if not I'll see if there's a close match as this is really an experimental project.

Stitching wise? nothing this week, again buried in paperwork and trying to get some sense of order in here.

Update, missing floss found ! some stitching done in the last couple of days so at least I have something to show.

Quaker sampler is coming on nicely now although I think I may run out of thread. The mystery cross stitch has been started. I know what it is but I'm not ready to show the hoped for result incase its a big failure.

18 stitch to the inch, a lot of stitches but not much to show.

Sorry this post is late, normal service will be resumed shortly ( hopefully)

Speak soon x