I've spent the last two days washing yarn, dying yarn, labelling yarn as well as finishing my knitting.
Result is that I declare 2024 TDF well and truly over for me. All bobbins empty and fibre bags waiting to be refilled .
Its been fun but I need to pick up my lace making and embroidery for a few days.
Thanks to everyone who has commented either here or on Facebook, blog posts will return to the usual weekly round up.
Thursday saw me heading down to the local inner city farm with my camera seeking breakfast. Toast and jam and a mug of tea :-)
Todays (Friday day 21) jobs will be to ply the lleyn, ply the bowmont, sew in ends and block shawlette and hat ( yep, I knitted a hat ) and dye the Ryeland that I spun a few days ago.
Hi, I've been busy over the last couple of days, some spinning has occurred on both days.
The bowmont on the Nano yesterday and some more LLeyn on the Ashford today.
Have you ever been asked for handspun yarn that looks handspun? Yep, apparently mine can be too consistant for people looking for 'proper' hand spun . So I'm spinning a couple of hundred grams at lightning speed as a result.
I find I can spin thick , thin, whatever but being asked to leave in the lumps, bumps and vegetation really stumps me.
I have also been washing fleece and even picking up random fleece from doorsteps. long story, but one of the two looks really nice.
larger bag is ryeland, the other is north country mule
As the sun briefly made an appearance I decided to get all the TDF spinning washed and on the line, three of the skeins had a detour via the dyepot.
Once dry I bought them in and here they are showing just how much difference washing yarn can make to the original yardage. They are all hanging from a pole across a bookcase and all the skeins were made on my Amish style swift on the same settings.
The blue skeins are LLeyn, the green is NCM, the four cream ones are Ryeland, the white one is bowmont and the black at the end is the wensleydale cross. You can see a very dramatic difference in length between the green and the cream ones.
This is the Shetland that I'm not sure whether to rescue, It was purchased by a friend in 2019 and passed on to me around 2021 as he felt that he wasn't going to bother with it. I've washed some of it, it looks like it has a natural break/rise in places and may need another wash depending on how sticky it is.
After washing, look at those curls, I think that this may take some time to process :-)
I'm going to comb some then spin a sample to see what I think.
Verdict, spins up soft but a lot of effort for a little fibre, one for the 'life's too short' pile I'm afraid.
I'll keep this short,
LLeyn plyed check
wensleydale/zwartble first bobbin spun check
skeins labelled so I can tell which white ones are which check
It seems that all the local summer fetes and festivals are this weekend coming, I'm hoping to get to a couple of them on Saturday and fingers crossed for a steam punk event on Sunday. Of course this will only work if it stops RAINNING !!!
I spent most of Monday, day 10 , asleep so it was a well timed rest day. My cold seems to be just that, a summer cold., fortunately as I'm feeling a lot better and actually felt like spinning on Tuesday.
I 've now got four bobbins of Lleyn lined up ready to ply.
I'm also making a start on the remnants of the Wensleydale x Zwartbles that I found in the washed fleece bag. Just 100gm of this but it makes a change.
I didn't spin much yesterday, just finished the bobbin of Lleyn that I had started the previous day. As a result I've decided to take a rest day ( today day 10)
My morning has already been busy, gammon joit in the over to serve cold with salad this week, holiday cakes also in the oven.
What are holiday cakes, In this case they are cakes associated with places we visited on our last trip.
Lost Gardens of Heligan pineapple cake... we love the campsite next to the gardens which gives us the chance to pop in and out whenever we choose plus, as usual, I love taking photos there.
The other bake is flapjack using muesli milled by the water mill at Dunster Castle.
Photo is of Dunster Yarn Market
I woke up yesterday with a sore throat, not what I wanted but not too unusual as a combination of chronic cough along with hayfever sometimes plays havoc this time of year. The good thing was that Ian is away from the weekend so I didn't need to speak to anyone at all :-)
I had planned to go to knit group but cancelled and played a game of "if you tidy a room and mop the floor then you can spin" you can see from the amount of spinning that three floors were mopped haha.
In the evening I added a few more rows to the shawl and combed out some more Shetland.
As for today, day nine, I'll see how I feel after doing the weekly shop. I may venture out with the Nano depending on the weather.
Last week turned out to be fleece delivery week. After clearing the decks of almost all my fleece stash, I've started to restock with freshly sheared fleece.
The first to arrive was the RSPB ebay purchase of three un-named fleeces, the photos of sheep and rolled fleece indicated that at least one was a Jacob which is good as I'm on a woolly hat knitting kick at the moment and at £5 plus postage I was quite happy to take a chance.
Yep, I would say that the box contained two Jacob fleeces :-) but the third fleece has me puzzled.
I'm leaning towards it being a Romey cross, I'll see how it washes up in the next couple of weeks.
Two days later the next parcel arrived containing three bags of fleece, two of them being from Dolly, the third from Daisy. These are a lleyn cross so not super soft but seriously warm and woolly once knitted so will be hats, infact one of the hats will be going back to the farmer in a few weeks as he said that he has never had anything made from his fleece.
I've already washed and spun a few grams just to see what it's like and there is more in the bucket as I type.
The next test will be to see how well it holds the dyes.
