Holiday inspiration

We were priviliged to encounter some amazing wildlife in Hawaii, the most amazing, green turtles, blue nose and spinner dolphins, all sorts of coral reef fish, have to reside in our memories alone, no photos were taken. There were, however, these wonderful cardinals, gorgeous and cheeky birds that were everywhere we went.

I discovered these were the northern cardinal and the other, equally cheeky birds we saw were Brazilian cardinals. Both are introduced to Hawaii, but they brightened up our days. I managed to find a couple of pictures of both birds on the net.

As nests are still a source of inspiration, I went looking for these birds nests and found reasonably traditiional looking nests. Full of all sorts of chunky materials and beautiful blue eggs.

 I've been trying to figure out another wall hanging and have wanted to use this yarn that I picked up a little while ago at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild textile bazaar. The red is amazing and now I have something red to work from. I think this is going to be suitable to weave in as short lengths with fuzzy ends.

I've done a bit of a yarn wrap to try and get an idea for the warp, and, I think this is just about right. Random warping with one side with a bit more red than the other with a strong bit of black.

These are the other colours I've used.

Tomorrow, I'll make a short 2m warp and do some sampling.

Spinning red!

This Saturday was Experimental Spinning day and after returning from a very short sojourn at the beach house at Phillip Island, put a load of washing on and headed off.

We were working with 'red'. So we carded all our leftover bits of red, tops, yarns, fabric bits, silk, cotton, whatever we felt like and whatever we had on hand.

I started with a mix of merino and flax and added more! The beauty of working with a colour is that it all matches, and, more importantly, you see the range of colour that we call 'red', in this case. It's always fun and we always end up with gorgeous yarns.

I kept some of the flax/merino mix (from First Editions, of course) and spun it finely, then plyed with the fun stuff. Love the yarn.