Birthday reflections and Fibre Arts Friday

So yesterday was my 21st birthday (again). I got despondent in my mid thirties about the advancing years and so decided to start counting backwards, and as with such things the offspring have continued to find it amusing, consequently Creature made me a 21st birthday cake.

Mum and dad sent me this most beautiful enamelled pendant from a craft event at Bovey Tracey, made by an artist called Janine Partington. As I said to mum on the phone it is the most perfect of presents as I would have seen it and thought how lovely but never bought it for myself. I gave up wearing much in the way of jewellery when the children were tiny since babies always got their fingers tangled in necklaces (and who has time in the morning to choose body decoration with four small children demanding food), so maybe now is the time to start again.

I had a plan to write myself a 'before I'm 50' bucket-list-type-thing of stuff to try and work on/achieve/whatever over the next year but I didn't want it to be a 'go bungee jumping/skydiving/walk the great wall of china' thing (mainly because I have no money, but also because I am not that into heights:-) Anyway I made a list that is more like new year resolutions than buckets:

• submit something to the Bridport Prize competition 
• learn some poetry by heart 
• spend more time reading and less on the computer
• systematically look for a new job
• stick with the zumba
• go to the theatre
• go back to the felting and spinning, much neglected in the last year

I have started doing a course on Coursera entitled Know Thyself, a mixture of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, aesthetics and Buddhism (as the description says), run by the University of Virginia. I have started (yet another) blog as a place to put the 'assignments', though strictly the assignments are for your own benefit and you pass the course by passing the online tests each week, but I feel like what is the point if you don't give some real thought to the questions they are raising. So far, so interesting.

Since today is Friday please also pop over (for those craftily inclined) to Fibre Arts Friday and see the shares. I have spun one hank of the roving that I dyed last week and am very pleased with it. I only use a spindle and just spin singles, I have no idea how to go about plying. Not sure I will knit anything with it any time soon as Dunk has been hinting for his jumper and I have a plan for a knitted dress that we found in one of Julie's magazines.

Busy weekend

I have been feeling a lot better and enjoying the sunshine on Friday Jules and I sat in the garden to do stuff for a stall she is having at a summer festival thing next week. The Boy is going to the World Scout Jamboree in Sweden this summer and they are raising money to pay for it (It costs a lot so the rich kids can subsidise the children coming from poor countries. If you have a spare fiver you can pop over HERE and donate to their fund.) Julie is mainly doing crochet hats, quick to create and always popular. I dug out some novelty yarns that I have had in my stash for ages and made this funky belt/scarf, am really pleased with it, hope it sells.

Then I got out this chunk of gleaned camel fluff that we collected two years ago on a trip to the Cotswold Wildlife Park. It has been combed and cleaned out a bit but had been waiting for ...
... me to spin in into something that resembles garden twine!! It's kind of soft in bits but mostly rather rough and hairy.
I had been thinking of a rustic look bracelet but think that they are a bit too rustic for the stall so now me and M have matching mother/daughter bracelets. I liked the nice simple pattern though and will knit some more up in nice coloured cotton for the stall.
I was also very bad (not supposed to be buying books) and popped around a couple of the charity shops on my way back from seeing the nurse yesterday, and came away with these four for under £3: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver (because I am reading The Lacuna), Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureshi (short stories), At Paradise Gate by Jane Smiley (because I loved A Thousand Acres) and We were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. So I am all set for the summer now.

Spinning and Felted 'pod'

Just doing a bit of 'catch-up' posting, I have had a busy time over the recent bank holiday days.

Some home dyed roving I have had in the stash for quite some time:

here it is spun up:

One of the many, many felt blogs that I follow is Angela Barrow, not an amateur craft felter but a professional felt artist, and she makes amazing creations like this felt pod:
She very kindly created this very helpful tutorial so I decided to have a go at making a 'pod'. The first side laid out:
I made some thin dreads and decided to put them inside the pod (to protect them during the felting process I made the resist double thickness and put them between the two layers):
I decorated the outside with bits of contrasting grey and some red silk fibres (which don't really show up very well):
Here it is mid-felt, I decided to make several small openings:
I think it ended up looking a bit like a pixie house:

Bikes and yarn

I came home from work yesterday to find a hole in the side of my bike tyre so this morning Dunk and I popped round to the bike shop. As we stood for a moment in the shop a man with two children asked about getting his son's puncture mended, the shop man told them it would be Wednesday before it could be done, so then they left and I was a little bemused that no one suggested to them they could buy a puncture repair kit and do the job themselves perfectly easily and then the boy could go out biking the same day. Now I realise the shop wants to make money but surely getting someone interested in using their bike and being able to do basic maintenance could mean more for them in terms of long term customers. What is the world coming to, why are people so unable to imagine doing something as everyday as mending a puncture ... why when we were kids we spent many a happy afternoon bending all mum's best spoons getting tyres off our bikes:-) Anyhow we went home and I spent an hour or two messing about with spanners (and tyre levers, to save the cutlery) and getting dirty, and now I have a nice shiny bike with new tyres.

In between the knitting I picked up some shetland roving from BabyLongLegs called 'summer berries' that Tish bought at Ravday. It had been part used, to make dreadlocks I think, but I found it in my stash and I have spun the rest, about 75g into a lovely multi-shaded yarn in deep reds and purples.

Cosy feet

This bright roving that I bought about two years ago has finally become a lovely pair of homespun multi-coloured socks, I like the way that they do not match but are still a pair.

a bit of spinning

Having mooched around for a couple of days I am trying not to waste the last bit of sick leave so I dug out some roving yesterday to try out a little experiment I had been thinking of. It is distinctly amateurish, broken in places, fuzzy in places, lumpy in places and very uneven, but I kind of like it. It is spun (still on the drop spindle) mainly in a very dark blue merino with little scraps of leftover colour added randomly in by hand. Some are little tiny and some quite long, some one colour at a time and some have two or three twisted in together. It's not very long, maybe 50g, (I'm not sure if some of the 100g I started with had been used for something else) and measured by my "approximately 1 metre each wrap round the table" method it is about 75 metres, so we are probably talking a skinny scarf-let.

p.s that's Holly, the anti-social cat.

Bits and bobs

So what with having to go to work this week I have messed around at a few things. This is the first bit of spinning I have done in a while. I started it when I was at my sister's a few weeks ago and finished it at the weekend. It was a blended berry coloured roving from Sarah's Texture Crafts.

This one is just playing around with layers; white underneath which is then exposed by pulling holes in the coloured layer over the top when it is partly felted. I think it will be more effective the other way round. I will probably try some other combinations. But it is quite pretty and now acting as a mat in the middle of the kitchen table.
Then I spent a while doing some blending. I bought a nice stash of colours a while ago but they are all very vibrant and I wanted to make some more muted colours, so I used a pair of mini carders and created some little rolls blending different colour combinations. Some started out with just two but then I started adding little bits of several colours. It is quite fun, you don't get a new colour exactly,because of course you can see the strands of the different coloured fibres but the overall effect is very pleasing. I particularly liked blending dark colours with a bit of white.
A lovely new bag of undyed roving arrived as well so then I took some of the blended colours and decided to do a bowl round a circular resist. This is the spiral pattern laid out, wetted down and partly rolled:
However it did not shrink anything like as much as I expected, so it ended up as a beret instead. Something else that requires further experimentation
As usual it fits M ... and anyway she is the hat person in the family.

Rainbow homespun and camels

I am pleased with how my latest batch of homespun has turned out. It was a blended rainbow roving from Sarah's Texture Crafts (Sarah also runs a felting forum here.). There seemed to be a lot of blue as I spun but from some angles it is more green and yellow dominated. It is the fun of such projects that you are not sure quite how it will turn out. As usual I have a lovely hank of stuff and no idea what I might make with it, probably only enough for a scarf or something small.
When we were at the Cotswold Wildlife Park yesterday we saw a herd of these Bactrian Camels, not the most fascinating of animals ... but they were shedding big lumps of camel hair. If I had been allowed into the enclosure there could have been enough to make a jumper or two but as it was C, little M and I walked the entire periphery of the camel enclosure and collected a large fistful of somewhat grassy camel hair. There is a lovely variety of shades; pale cream through to really dark brown. I am going to have a go at spinning it and see how it turns out, so watch this space.

Felting with C and M

Today I am home with some visitors and when they tired of watching children's telly I offered them the chance to get a bit messy. So I got out the stash and we had fun messing around with fluff. C chose an abstract 'nature' theme for his design:

Little M (to distinguish her from my M) chose to do a flower picture.

I took a bit of handspun that I made the other day from my rainbow roving and just spiralled it around itself.

I had been trying to do some 'proper' spinning, having discovered that I have been doing it all 'wrong'. I am left handed so I tried to spin by drafting with my left hand, except I just found it kept breaking as I could not balance the spinning speed with drafting the fibre at the right rate. So in the end I abandoned the experiment and went back to using my own method (which is totally pre-drafting the fibre and having it in a fluffy pile next to me as I spin) and used the tatty bit I had made for this project.

This is how they looked when we had finished. C and little M enjoyed getting very soapy and 'shocking' their felts.

I had also been browsing felting stuff the other day and wanted to post this link as I found it so inspiring and quite helpful, in terms of a method for doing larger more ambitious projects. It shows an Iranian felt rug maker doing a traditional design rug: Namad The site is called Peace Industry and it is a couple who are trying to revive the use of traditional felt rug making techniques.

Reading not spinning

I have had a variety of books from the library recently including a lovely India Flint felting book and a very nice one on victorian lace shawls. Don't be fooled into thinking we have some kind of fantastic library here, it is tiny, but now you can access the Gloucestershire catalogue and order things online, so I find things that sound interesting and just look them up. Most things are worth the 50p reservation fee even if you just browse through for a while after work. I had high hopes of 'The woolcraft book : spinning, weaving and dyeing' by Constance Jackson, it turned out to be rather old fashioned with not nearly enough pictures. However if you ever want to buy a spinning wheel it had pages of sound advice on what to look for in a good second hand wheel. It also had a good section on natural dyeing but I hardly have room and time to do all the things I am currently interested in so don't want to start developing new things at the moment.

I also came across a lovely title called 'A Handspindle Treasury - 20 years of spinning wisdom from Spin-Off Magazine' which has been totally fascinating. It is a collection of articles written for Spin-Off Magazine all on the subject of spinning with a hand spindle, but also background and historical stuff and articles about different styles of spinning from around the world. I find it incredible that there are people who make a living and get to travel around the world just to learn about spinning from other cultures. And I wonder what these other women (for they are mainly women) think of these western academics coming into their lives and sitting down and wanting to know all about their craft. For many of them their lives are based on subsistence living and their spinning is simply integral to their survival, and yet at the same time many cultures create the most beautiful of objects, rugs and cloth, with the time and effort taken being far beyond what is necessary for mere warmth. I think it is part of what makes humans what they are that they strive to create beauty, and we do place great value on skills that are both useful and beautiful. Anyway, you might be able to find this, but I bought the only second hand copy listed on Amazon and they don't seem to stock it on the Interweave Press site.

And so on to Carol Sheilds "The Republic of Love". I liked this book because of the characters, all of whom were very real. It follows Tom and Fay and their parallel and somewhat tenuously linked lives. The first half of the book sets the background of their lives, and the complex web of relationships that exist amongst their friends and families. I loved the little vignettes she draws of the different characters, which is what makes them so believable. I got the impression that it is the 'republic' bit of the title that the author was stressing rather than the 'love'. The dictionary says this on the subject of 'republic': a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch. I think she may have been trying to make some very specific observations on the nature of human relationships, but it may have been a little too subtle for me, or maybe I was concentrating too hard on the people themselves to notice. It is not a 'romance' at all. While I enjoyed the first part of the book I was sitting on tenterhooks all the time waiting for the moment, that you could see approaching in the distance, when they would finally meet. So they meet and then Fay goes away, for some weeks, and they both sit and brood intensely about each other. And what you are left with from this separation is the anticipation of some very grand passion, but it is not like that at all. What they have is what I can only call 'absolute certainty'. They fall into a life together that contains no doubts, that they want the same thing and that they will be happy. So when Fay has a family crisis that intervenes in their marriage plans it was somewhat disconcerting for her to turn round and break up the relationship. It felt a little like a contrivance, something to upset the situation so that you then get your moment of revelation and your happy conclusion. But I was left with a message that I agree with; that people need people, that being 'significant' to another human being is quite vital to happiness. I don't get the whole 'marriage' thing and why people seem to think that it is the only real form of commitment but leaving that issue aside I do think the book said something interesting about human nature.

yet more spinning

I am turning into a granny rather rapidly these days, though in my defense I did spend the other morning spinning along to The Undertones (on Spotify) so I was reliving my teenage years at the same time.

So we got some yellow and black to add to all the reds and blues and Tish and I did a bit more dyeing. I decided to risk doing some roving, which I had not tried before; there is always a possibility if you are not careful that you end up with a big lump of felt, what with all the soaking and rinsing involved. Anyway, I squeezed it **very** gently and what I ended up with was this:

And the yarn that resulted looks like this:

I am still using the spindle, despite being sorely tempted by a spinning wheel (which went for £90 in the end, and we have nowhere to put it and....), all I need now is to knit something with it, rather than add it to the stash.

Oh yes, here is how the Noro top turned out. I won't bore you with the whole saga, needless to say it was quite a trial and involved quite a bit of frogging and reknitting until I was happy.

More amateurish spinning

So I have been doing a bit more spinning recently, two hanks of undyed merino (and will probably do a bit more) that I want to dye up together so I can actually make more than a baby hat with it, and some of the alpaca (have also got photos of my first attempts at carding, which was time consuming but could be pretty good exercise for the pecks I think:-), which was an absolute bugger to spin (but the felt I tried instead is lovely and soft). Having said that baby hats are the order of the day at the moment so I decided yesterday to spin a bit of colourful stuff to make another. I am finding that a little bit of roving seems to go an awful long way. I initially bought 500g of the undyed, about 200g of mixed greens and yellow and 250g of mixed reds (from various ebay sources) and having used various bits for both felting and spinning it hardly seems to have reduced the stash at all.

I picked out this yellow and then simply pulled off a length of the red to match:

And then drafted it together in batches (I also tend to tease this out gently as I go to even out the thickness.)
It took me about an hour and some, and when I hanked it up it came to nearly 60m (the little table is quite nicely about 1m round so I count it as I wind it up.) i am really pleased with how it has come out. I am getting better at getting an even thickness
I set the twist, squeeze it out and then leave to dry overnight in the hot cupboard. I am wanting to get it knitted today but have promised M I will make a start on her hoodie (which has been in the pipeline for a month now since I am recycling a lovely cotton/angora yarn from a charity shop find). What I really enjoy about the spinning is the process of transformation, from fluff into yarn ... and then of course from yarn into something wearable, or useful. Felting is the same, taking something insubstantial and turning it into something solid.
This photo shows (from top to bottom) the undyed merino, the alpaca and the two tone red and yellow.

Spinning experiment

I can see myself wanting to buy a spinning wheel at some point but the simple spindle (which has apparently been around for more than 10,000 years) is a lot of fun. Maybe when I have someone to help we can make a film of the spindle in action. This first picture shows the rovings, which are merino wool (though I didn't use any of the purple stuff) and the spindle. You need a small length of wool to act as a leader, just to get it started. You can simply tease the fibres out as the spindle spins, but after doing some with M on Tuesday we found it was better to separate out fine lengths of roving and allow them to twist gently together to join them.

This photo shows the yarn on the spindle, it is partly being wound into a hank around a little folding table. After you wind the hank you tie it up in a few places and then soak it in hot water for a while to 'set the twist'. Then you rinse it out in cold water and squeeze well inside a towel. Then you 'shock' the hank by thwacking it off something hard (I used a kitchen chair). Then hang up to dry with a small weight, like a coat hanger, to stretch it out.

This photo shows the finished item. It is only about 20 metres long or so.

This photo shows my second attempt. This effect was created by laying out very fine lengths of white and red roving together and then spinning them together.

This photo shows the knitting partly completed. I just wanted to make a little something with the first batch so chose a pattern for a small drawstring pouch.

And here is the finished pouch.