Seaweed scarf

What a busy day. Pulled the back panel of last years Sheep and Wool entry to do some vital repairs. Wonderful fun surrounded by yarn, fibre, finished products and dogs.....obviously not my house.


The night was filled with my Beginners Spinners class. This is the half way mark and they are all doing very well. I have not doubt, that they'll walk away feeling very pleased with themselves. Next week we do some random dyeing. After four weeks of cream fleece, it will be time for a bit of colour.


Then I went home and finished my seaweed scarf. I absolutely love this. I hope it finds a home.

More Wrist warmers

I'm feeling inspired again, so I've created a couple of more wristies. One's a little too Christmassy for my liking, but who knows.

The cuff uses a mixture of black commercial yarn from Littlewood fleece...so it's good, and, my handspun fibre sandwich yarn. It's basically all rib.

The only thing I'm concerned about is the price I need to charge. As I haven't sold any yet, this is still an unanswerable question. I guess, let's see what winter brings.

Finished skein

I've finally finished my 10x10 skein. It's not quite what I thought I'd have. Found a green to dye it with and crammed it into a pot. I don't want a consistent colour. Unfortunately, I left it for half and hour and on too high a temperature and it boiled and it slightly felted. Ooops!

But I do really like it and will knit it up into a very loose and simple scarf.

Textile weekend

What a lovely weekend. Saturday was the HWSG monthly meeting, where I give my report on the two groups I convene: Experimental spinning and 3D5S. It's lovely to catch up with friends, have a look at what's going on and sometimes, if you're lucky, add to your fibre, yarn or book stash. Though all sorts of things turn up on the trading table.

What more do you want? Friends, fibre, laughter and coffee...it doesn't get much better.

Well maybe, Sunday was 3D5S where we looked at the 10x10 contributions. We had a good number, though I now really feel the need to do a good name tag! I didn't quite finish mine, as I still need to dye it. I used some Silky wool to wrap around an English Leicester single and then I've plied it with a fine wool boucle to try and create the little bumps on the original photo. Currently it's soaking and seems more like the initial inspiration than this on the bobbin or the yarn in its hank. So the final product is for a future blog.

We also worked on our entry for the Australian Sheep and Wool show. We managed to really hone in on what we want to do and are in the process of refining our colour scheme.

NOTE: I love getting your comments and have finally found a format for responding. I'll just add little notes, if required. Be assured that if I don't respond, I still love them.

Two comments require response:

- I'll get on to Incub8tr

- Etsy seems such a BIG world. I recently read 60,000 sellers. It just makes me feel that I would be such a little fish. I may still however, come to change my mind.

Mary Walker Phillips (1923-2007)

As you may realise, this week has not been particularly productive. On Friday, however, I did pick up the latest issue of Vogue Knitting. This is always something to light my day and I would usually share something with you that takes my fancy.

This month, however, brings the belated news, for me at least, that Mary Walker Phillips has passed away. Her book, 'Creative Knitting' has so inspired me for so many years. I found it in the 90's and was grateful when Interweave Press reprinted it not so long ago. I immediately purchased it. When I first found out about this book, I googled 'Mary Walker Phillips' and found very little information. However, it did mention two of her books, one a macrame book and the other on counterpanes. Surprisingly, I own the macrame book, from around the early 80's because it was one of the more interesting books. I've tried to find the Counterpanes book. Unfortunately, it has been 'lost' from the HWSG library. I will try harder to obtain a copy.

'Creative Knitting' is just such an inspiration for a creative knitter like me and my 'Kimberley knitting' was wholely inspired by it during my trip. I will argue that if you don't own this book and want to do creative knitting then you're just missing out on both a wealth of inspiration and instruction. There are no patterns, just invented stitches, suggested yarns and needles and lots of pictures. Pity it's not in colour.

I am very sad that she's gone, but boy, am I glad that Mary Walker Phillips was here.

Picker yarn

Spent yesterday spinning. It's funny, but this is the last resort activity. When I don't feel like doing much, I spin.

This is the 'Picker yarn' - still wet hanging on the line. I've had this dyed fleece for ages not knowing what to do with it. Finally, I decided to put it through the Picker. This opens the fleece and traditionally, in preparation for carding. I however, used the picked fleece and just spun up two bobbins, taking what came along. Then put the rest through the carder and spun a fine, not quite perfect single. Plied all three together.

I'm very happy with the result. It is a little dull with all that mixing of colour, but I knew that would happen.

I'm also finally spinning my 10x10 challenge, though the design has changed several times to where I think I'm quite happy where I'm going.....You'll just have to wait till Sunday.

I've also been asked to run some classes at the Bendigo guild and have decided to send some pictures of some yarns for them to have a look at before deciding on the structure of the class. They want to do some plying, so a multi-ply yarn, then one of a modified bullion and finally core-spinning with multi-coloured top. Jenny from Ballarat is great and I've been there before and it was fun!

PS. There were two comments to my last post. One from Moorecat, thankyou very much... the chooks are Light Sussex. I love that!

The other slipped through and is a link to a pharmecutical, so please don't follow the link. I'll be more careful!

10X10 challenge

Feeling a bit down with regards to making more for the market, I've decided to abandon work for the week and do a few things I really want to. The first is the 10x10 challenge that is set for 3D5S, the inspiration/design group I belong to. The challenge is to produce a 10x10cm piece which can be in any technique. I chose embroidery, but it could be yarn wraps, knitting, collage, drawing, crochet, anything.

I've put in my effort from last year, which was inspired by some amazing chooks at the Collingwood Children's farm. The yarn used for the embroidery was handspun from black & red top, and white glitz. I am very pleased with it.

This is the picture I'm using to produce this years. It's a bit obvious what I'm likely to do, but.....