Author Archives: Heather

Le Tour de Fleece 2011: Day Five

Luckily I haven’t been involved in anything like the crashes that the cyclists have experienced today.

I dropped my parents off at Heathrow this morning without a hitch, then came home and put some sealant round our upstairs tap which has been leaking, hopefully I have fixed it. Then made some good inroads into a work project this afternoon and watched the tour and spun this evening.

I’ve made a good start on the third bobbin of merino/silk:

After some fun suggestions on ravelry I shall be trying to use a different coin each day to demonstrate the yarn thickness. So I thought I would kick off with a french 1 Euro coin as it was rather pretty.

Le Tour de Fleece 2011: Day Four

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An early update today because I shall be busy later. We are recording the rest of the cycling today to catch up on too.

In between catching up with other bits and pieces today I have managed to finish my second bobbin of the merino / silk!

The one I finished today is on the right. And I manged to trim the bush I use as my photo backdrop this morning 🙂

Le Tour de Fleece 2011: Day Three

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More good progress today as the riders enter Brittany. I am really looking forward to watching the next few days as they ride closer to the area we used to go to for many happy summer holidays as children.

It was spinning group at Ash today, so I made a good start on my second bobbin of merino/silk:

It was lovely to catch up with everyone. Due to being on holiday and other bits and pieces I have missed the last couple of Ash meetings, it was nice to be back.

Le Tour de Fleece 2011: Day Two

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Another good day of spinning here. It was an exciting and close race among the cyclists, though because of being a team time trial there wasn’t quite so much French scenery as on a normal race day.

I have finished my first bobbin of singles with my merino/silk. So 1/3 done, 2/3 left to go:

I think my progess will be slowing down from now on because my days will be busier with other bits and pieces which need to be done, but it is a good start 🙂

Le Tour de Fleece 2011: Day One

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As you have probably gathered it has been a busy few months here! I can’t believe it has been more than 6 months since I last posted. I have been doing a bit of knitting and spinning in amongst everything else, and even taking some photos of it all. It will probably take me a while to sort all the photos out and catch up. I have decided to take part in the Tour de Fleece again this year, spinning along while watching the Tour de France, always good fun, and hopefully a good way to get me back into the blogging.

So, onward!

This year I am spinning yet more merino silk, it is lovely stuff, how can I resist (well it should be fairly clear by now that I can’t resist). This blend is 70% merino, 30% silk, from Wingham Wool Works. I think it is a fabulous colour, but am a little concerned that it wouldn’t be good near my face, so I am going to spin a fine-ish 3ply and make some socks.

Here is the progress before I started spinning today:

And here is the bobbin at the end of today’s spinning:

It is not terribly consistent (the racing got a bit exciting in parts!), but I am enjoying it, and hoping I will improve with practice.

A blanket for my niece

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You may recall that I started a baby blanket for my niece a little while ago, and knitted quite a bit of the centre of it on my holidays. I finally finished it and my parents kindly stuffed it in their suitcase when they flew over to meet Jennifer at the end of October.

The pattern is a fairly traditional Shetland hap pattern from Chris Williams’s Lace Class. The inside square is garter stitch knitted on the bias. There is then a border of feather and fan pattern, and then a sideways knitted simple garter stitch lace edging.

It was very enjoyable to knit, and although Jenny is a little young to be expressing an opinion on these things her parents seem to like it 🙂

I used 6 x 50g of Sirdar Snuggly 4ply, 55% nylon, 45% acrylic, and 4mm needles.

The blocking was slightly scary. Being nylon and acrylic you have to be a bit careful with blocking if you use steam. However if you pin out your blanket and steam it very gently it will actually set the stitches so that it wont need blocking after subsequent washing. The careful part is key here since you have to be very careful not to totally melt your yarn! As you hover with the steam you can actually see the stitches relaxing (permanently!). A lie down in a darkened room is recommended after you do this.

It all went ok though, and hopefully this will save the blanket from needing to be reblocked while still being easily washable.

Ally Pally

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As you have probably guessed it has been a busy couple of months here. One good thing about being snowed in for nearly a week is that I have had a bit of time to start to catch up on things. I am going to try and be fairly chronological otherwise I shall be even more confused than usual, so it might take me a few posts to get up to speed.

Anyway, back in the middle of October I made the annual pilgrimage to Alexandra Palace for the Knitting and Stitching Show. Unfortunately Mummy couldn’t come with me this time as the dates just didn’t work out (this being retired lark seems to make one very busy), so as it was just me I only went for one day (the last few years we had been going for two). I had a lovely time looking around at all of the stands and chatting to everyone.I even had a bit of a look at the exhibition too. There were some very interesting sculptures made from paper in the exhibition, very delicate, intricate and beautiful.

Unsurprisingly some of the lovely goodies came home with me. I had a nice chat to the lovely people on the Buffalo Gold stand, and bought this gorgeous fibre from them:

1 oz of 50% buffalo, 50% silk. I think I need to improve my longdraw before I have a go with this. Just sticking your hand in it is pretty good though. Better than a stress ball 🙂

Also from Buffalo Gold I bought one skein of Lux, and a scarf pattern to go with it:

40g, 330 yards, 45% bison, 20% silk, 20% cashmere, 15% tencel in Malachite (how could I resist such a lovely colour).

Then I went to the Koigu stand. This was their first year at the show, and despite being in a rather dark corner they seemed to be doing very good business. It was wonderful to see such a large collection of their colours all in one place. Stash in Putney used to stock their yarn, but could understandably only stock a fraction of the possible colours.

I bought two skeins of their Koigu Premium Merino in a semi-solid blue, it is a bit darker than I have managed to capture:

2 x 50g, 160m, 100% merino wool, colour 1020. I think they are going to be some socks with twisted stitch patterns on, but I haven’t decided on a pattern yet.

Next I moved to the JC Rennie stand, and found this lovely ball in their oddments bin:

50g Supersoft Lambswool (4ply) in Pagan. It was in the sale bin because it was the only one in that colour and had lost its label. I was really drawn towards the interesting combination of colours this is made up of. It is a colour with a lot of depth, and although it looks like a Shetland type wool it is much softer than you would expect. I am hoping to make some fingerless mittens although I might have to find a contrast colour to eek it out. I was impressed by the range of colours JC Rennie has and look forward to trying some more of their yarns soon.

Following on the theme of unusal yarns, I found this lovely one-off skein at Artisan Yarns:

100g, 400m, 50% merino, 50% silk. I had to buy it because the colours are fabulous, though I am not sure at the moment what it is going to become. Initially when I spotted it I thought socks, but that was before I realised it was 50% silk. I am a bit concerned that with that much silk it will knit up to a fairly inelastic fabric and that socks would loose their shape and fall down. Although the yarn would make good lace, I think the colour is a bit noisy for lace. I shall continue to think on it. If anyone has any suggestions I would be most grateful.

As is often the case one of the most enjoyable aspects of the show was the chance to catch up with people and to share knitting and fibre chat with so many lovely like-minded people. I had a very enjoyable, though rather tiring day.

On an entirely different note, a couple of days before Ally Pally I happened to be in Lidl in Leatherhead, and found they were selling sock yarn!

4 x 50g, 210m, 75% wool, 25% polyamide, colour 3305. It is a lovely forrest green though that is a little hard to tell from my rubbish photography. I recall it being a very reasonable price, but in typical fashion I have now forgotten what that price was. I think I see a couple of pairs of textured socks in my future.

Free Concert on Friday

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For anyone in the Barnes (South-West London) area who would like to hear some fun music for free on Friday (8th October), the band I play in, Barnes Concert Band (I play 2nd trombone), will be doing a joint concert with a Swiss brass band called Fanfare de Gryon at 7.30pm at St Michael and All Angels Church, Elm Bank Gardens, Barnes, London. More information here. We would love to see you, and if you do come, then come up and say hello.

We will be playing the first half, with the Swiss doing the second half, and then we will join together at the end. We are playing a variety of fairly recent music, not particularly well known stuff, but a good variety of classical style and big band style, and they have nice tunes 🙂 I’m not sure about the Swiss band’s program but think there are doing several marches, and some songs from the shows. We are playing the Liberty Bell for our joint piece (if I am remembering rightly that was the Monty Python music).

Scotland, Loseley, and the start of a baby blanket

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Back at the beginning of September we had a lovely week’s holiday in south west Scotland, with a few days staying with my parents in North Yorkshire on our way up and back again. I have finally got round to downloading the photos from the camera and having a sort through.

The weather was a bit variable, but in general pretty good for the time of year, although it did rain on us horribly while we walked up Roseberry Topping whilst visiting my parents. You can see the wall of rain approaching from the distance in this photo. We had high winds and hail too! Luckily we also had somewhere to dry out and warm up once we had finished our walk, and that makes all the difference 🙂

One of the fields we could see from the top of the hill was full of fairly recent hay bales, and rather reminded me of beads on garter stitch, or possibly rib.

Up in Scotland we stayed in a lovely B&B in Castle Douglas. We had a lovely holiday, pottering around, taking nice walks, going to a few second hand bookshops, and visiting lots of Historic Scotland sites.

This is Sweetheart Abbey:

and this is Dundrennan Abbey:

We also looked round the gardens at Castle Kennedy, and saw this fantastic lichen, which made me think of Rosie 🙂

On the way back to my parents we stopped at Jedburgh Abbey, another spectacular building.

Then with my parents we went to Rievaulx Abbey.

Quite a cultured holiday 🙂

With all those busy days I needed some nice restful knitting for the evenings, so started a baby blanket for the new niece.

I am using Sirdar Snuggly 4ply and 4mm needles. It will be a hap shawl style, like the mini one we did in Chris’s Lace class, but square this time rather than triangular. The centre square is all garter stitch, knitted on the diagonal, and was excellent holiday knitting. Especially when it was small it was easy to pull in and out of a bag and work a row or two of even when I was a bit tired and brain dead. Since taking that photo it has grown a bit, I shall photograph it again when it finally stops raining! Around the garter stitch centre, there will be a feather and fan border, and then a simple zigzag edging. It is a very enjoyable project to knit, but progress has slowed now that it has got a bit big to drag around everywhere. Still I am hopeful I will get it finished soon, particularly since I am hoping to send it out to my new niece with my parents when they go to visit in a couple of weeks. Nothing like a deadling to give one a spot of motivation 🙂

Continuing on the theme of sometimes inclement weather we had a rather cold and wet day out last Sunday demonstrating spinning with the West Surrey Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers at Loseley Park, for their country fair.

Luckily Rosemary was a life-saver and dashed out for hot chocolate half way through the afternoon which did well to defrost us.

Due to the weather there were definitely a lot fewer people than there had been at the same event last year. Although one bonus of this was that we had more time to talk to the people who were there. I am trundling along with spinning the merino / silk. The end is definitely in sight!

She’s here!

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My niece, Jennifer Anne, was born on Thursday! They got home yesterday afternoon and mum and baby are both doing fine, though have been a bit busy so I haven’t spoken to them yet.