Blanket forts come in all shapes and sizes

And this weekend, mine came in the form of approximately 9 hours (out of 36) driving a car, 5 hrs at a wool festival and 36 hours in the company of some really wonderful women.

My weekend compatriots

We've all had times when we've felt like running away, as fast and as far as our little feet will carry us (in my case, not very fast and, two weeks post-marathon, not very far, but you get the idea). Over the last few weeks I've found myself envisioning just saying fuck it and packing up my kids and my husband and my dog and running off to live in the woods. And come Saturday afternoon when Wonderful Woman #1 and Wonderful Woman #2 showed up at my house to pack into the car and head west to Malvern, Wonderful Woman #3 and Wonderwool Wales*, my sigh of relief was probably heard in Bangkok. I needed to head out, not think about Real Life (TM) and have some down time, preferably with wool and one or two adult beverages of various stripes.

Still life with Lager and SweetGeorgia Superwash DK

Saturday night was spent in an extended SnB, complete with Thai food, prosecco and chocolate with sea salt. There was discussion of knitting and spinning and designing, about various and sundry life things, about whether or not it is possible in an intellectually honest way to be atheist**, about boys and kids and grandkids and the future. All those wonderful wide ranging topics that get covered when you are together with some opinionated, smart people who are willing to discuss and listen.

Which one is Gaga?

Sunday morning we rousted ourselves, managed to produce reasonable coffee with a tea pot and tea strainer, and headed off to Builth Wells for what I think (with apologies to Unravel) is my favorite festival yet. Wonderwool Wales this year was bigger and better then ever, and (by virtue of going on Sunday) relatively uncrowded. I had a wonderful time wandering around, actually buying things on the spur of the moment (8 skeins of Blacker Yarns Jacob DK, I'm looking at you) (and fantasizing about the fantabulous sweater you are going to become), chatting with folks, salivating over fleece and drum carders and all manner of other things. It was blissful. And then we got in the car and headed back to London, talking about designing adn dyeing and collaborations and What The Industry Should Do. I suddenly realised that I was feeling the same way I feel after scientific conferences: inspired and excited and full of ideas and plans and things that must be started immediately! It's a wonderful feeling, one that I've been missing, and it was such a joy to sit there, speeding down the M4, knowing that the three people knitting around me were in the same place.

The haul: ChiaoGoo Twist complete set (because I am weak, weak, weak...), two skeins of BFL/alpaca laceweight from Eden Cottage Yarns, a boat shuttle/pirns from The Threshing Barn, one skein of self-stripin Ullcentrum 2-ply from Midwinter Yarns (who I believe started trading on Saturday. Way to jump in to the deep end guys!), and 8 (!) skeins of DK weight, woolen spun Jacob from Blacker Yarns, slated to become the most glorious cozy warm sweater ever.

So for that, I'd like to thank Allison, Catherine and Dani for listening to me, encouraging me, and inspiring me with all that they do. It was an absolutely phenomenal 36 hours, and I can't wait to do it again.


*There's a lot of wonder in this sentence. My apologies.
** We finally agreed on "Intellectual agnostic, emotional atheist". And giggled. Repeatedly. (That might have been the wine, except we were still giggling the next day).

The cure for grumpy pants

I've been in a crappy mood all week. Grouchy, out of sorts, irritated by everyone and everything around. I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm pretty much ready to be done with it...

I think I've found a solution to my mood, though, and it involves wool (big surprise, right?) Lots and lots of wool.

Hello Yarn Fiber Club Shetland, colorway "Dark and Stormy", June 2013 offering
Spun singles on Lendrum, 15:1 ratio
Plied (3-plied) on miniSpinner

WPI: 8-10, so somewhere around aran/worsted weight.
Grist: still needs to finish drying, so check back later
Yardage: 1100 yds total.

This comes out at heavy worsted weight according to wpi, but it feels bulkier to me. I pulled out all the fiber I had and tore each length in half, and then each piece into fourths and mixed them all up randomly before spinning. I spun the singles woolen, using a long backwards draw, to get fluffy, airy singles. The yarn is super light and cozy - I can't wait to knit it up! I'm thinking this is going to be a sweater with deep ribbing at the hem and cuffs, a loose fit and cables around a turtleneck or cowl. Kind of like this sweater that Allison pointed out to me this week, only my own design because I don't have the pattern.

So my cure for the grumpies is Shetland wool. At least this week - next week it will probably be merino and silk...

Rocking Kitchen Retreat: a stash-enhancement photo essay

So this past weekend, I headed up to West Yorkshire to spend some quality time with fellow knitwear designers at the first ever Rocking Kitchen Retreat, run by Joeli of Joeli's Kitchen, and Ruth of rock+purl. It was a great opportunity to meet a bunch of other UK designers, and swap ideas and tips and stories in a vast house for two days.

Ruth has been teasing us all on Twitter with 140 character hints about what was going to be in the goody bags, and the most recent vast box of yarn that had arrived at her studio. On Friday, we finally got to see the goods, as it were.

All of this yarn was crammed into a not-very-large bag. Along with the shade cards,

(that's not all of them), and a couple of books, and some needles and notions and OMG it was totally wicked!!!!

That was only the beginning. On Saturday, our hostesses pulled out a vast box of other yarn for people to dive into, plus some totally glorious taster skeins that were available for swatching. So, I swatched:

Yarns from Cascade, Lorna's Laces, Blacker Yarns and The Island Wool Company.

This is the final haul I brought home, after all was said and done. I'd like to be able to give you an actual yardage count, but I haven't yet found time to sit down and figure it out - it's gonna be a big number though! It was a fantastic weekend with a great group of people, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for some fellow designers! You can sign up for the Rocking Kitchen newsletter here, and that will keep you in the loop on any future goings on.

Without any further ado, here is the great and grand list of sponsors for the weekend - many thanks to all of them for their generosity and excitement about working with independent designers!

Space Cadet Creations

Terri Shea (spinningwheel.net) 
West Yorkshire Spinners
Chiaogoo
Kettle Yarn Co
Cashmered UK
Millamia
Manos
Cascade Yarns
Dirty Water Dye Works
Malabrigo Yarn
Artesano Yarns
Wooly Knit
Hiya Hiya
Island Wool Company
Lorna's Laces
Little Giddings Farm
Blacker Yarns
Designer Yarns
TB Ramsden

Before the crawl

Saturday is the first inaugural Great London Yarn Crawl, and I've been busy finalizing last details and pulling together door prizes. Since I'm not going to have a chance to do much yarn buying of my own on the day, I've been doing my best to make up for it.

When I got some more Spud & Chloe Sweater last week, I slipped on the way to the till and came up with 2 skeins of Fyberspates Scrumptious laceweight.

This is going to become a crocheted (!) cardigan somewhere down the line.

Then, this weekend, I got in to serious trouble over at Kettle Yarn Co. On Sunday, Linda handed me a lovely wrapped package with the following goodies.

Baby Alpaca/Merino/Bamboo Aran weight. This is going to become an Amor Deliria hat for the public release of the pattern next month.

Alpaca/Merino/Nylon sport weight. Not sure what this will become, but it's amazingly soft.

Falkland/Tencel fingering weight for a shawlette design.

So gorgeous and soft and squishy. I can't wait to crack into these!

Mother-enabled stash enhancement

My mom knits. Kind of. She likes to get some yarn and start up on a project, or plan for a project, but then she tends to run out of steam. I arrived in Maine to find her eager to get rid of some stash that she had acquired by wasn't going to use any time soon. She used to live around the corner from Windsor Button, which recently closed down, so she had a bunch of yarn that she'd picked up from their going out of business sale.

Noro Kochoran,

and Ella Rae Lace Merino - this is going to become a sweater for the purchaser.


She also had a couple of cones of mystery yarn lying around that she donated to the Cause of Enhancing My Daughter's Yarn Collection.

These have since been determined to be acrylic (hello melting burn test results!), but I plan to weave a table runner or something with them for her.

So herein ends the stash enhancement portion of the US visit. I'm going to ignore the fact that I am glossing over the pound and a half of Hello Yarn fiber that I had sent here so I could save on postage because really, there's no reason to over do it. But the new possibilities are very enticing - it's going to be a fun autumn!

Holiday stash enhancement

So, after all my agonizing over what knitting projects I was going to bring on vacation, and worrying about whether it was going to be enough, I probably just shouldn't have bothered.


I may have mentioned in the past that my parents' house is not very far away from Spunky Eclectic. On Tuesday afternoon, it was raining, so JoAnna and I went on a little mini-yarn crawl. First up was Amy's lair of wooly goodness, where I had a bit of a problem showing any restraint whatsoever.

Wool-flax in Lobster - I've been wanting to try this fiber blend for ages, and am really looking forward to it.

Some lovely, squooshy Targhee in "Bunny Kisses" and South African Fine in "Cowering Blueberry",


6 oz of some gorgeous Panda ("Winged Insects") that is destined to become a shawl,

and four cones of Cottolin for some weaving.

Then we headed up Route 1 to Romney Ridge Farm, a place I had never heard of before but which popped up on Knit Map. We had a fabulous time chatting with Kelly (the dyer/shepherdess) and I came home with some of her yarn in the colorway "Cranberry Bog".


In fact, it was so irresistible that I wound it up yesterday and cast on for an entrelac cowl.

Finally, we headed back home via Halcyon, where I picked up something that is going to keep me busy for a very, very long time:

I am sorely tempted to buy a couple kilos of Falkland and work my way through this book from beginning to end, trying all the variations she describes. I think it would make me a much better spinner, and be huge fun. But I've got to make a list of all the yarns first - I think it's going to be a huge number!

So that's it from the East Coast of the US. Hopefully next week I'll have a new cowl, and a few more posts before I head off into the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. Summer vacation sure is fun!

Tour de Fleece 2013: The Final Reckoning

The stats:
1615 yds/30.6 oz total finished yarn spun.
783 yds of 3-ply, for 2349 yds of singles.
832 yds of 2-ply, for 1664 yds of singles.

Total singles length: 4013 yds, 3.7 km, 2.3 miles spun over 23 days.

The yarns: top left corner is 607 yds/14.4 oz of 3-ply bulky black Shetland, spun from drum carded batts, from a fleece that I bought at Wonderwool Wales this past April. This was my second fleece-to-hadnspun-sweaterlot I've done for Tour de Fleece - my first was last year, and it was a total failure. I credit this year's success to the fact that I was able to borrow a drum carder, which made the fiber prep so much easier! The finished yarn is soft and squishy, and is going to make a really cozy sweater. I'm hoping there's enough yardage for a full jumper, but we'll see! Top down sweater knitting is going to be my friend on this one.

Circling around to the right side is my project specific spin: Hello Yarn Finn in "Winter Storage"

I split the multi-colored top into 6 groups and spun a 2-ply sport/fingering weight to knit Brenda's Now in a Minute shawl. I think I might have to cast on this week. It's lovely soft stuff, 590 yds/7.8 oz - I'm about 10 yds short of the amount called for in the pattern, but I think it will be ok. We will see...

Next up: I had to take a break in the middle of the never-ending Shetland spin to do something with color, so I spun up a bag of ends of my own Euglena Suffolk.

One skein of 2-ply, 229 yds/3.3 oz, and one mini-skein of chain ply from the left over singles. It's about 14 wpi, so fingering weight, and is going to make some seriously awesome green socks.

The final yarn, singles started on Thursday, yarn plied and finished on Saturday:

Spunky Eclectic Bluefaced Leicester in "Autumn". I bought this top in a whirlwind stash enhancing trip to Amy's shop in August 2009, and it's been marinating in my stash ever since. I've got one more braid left from that trip, so I think I'll need to be stocking up again next month when we visit my parents.

I managed to make a collage for every day I spun during the Tour, and I've uploaded them all to a flickr set here if you're interested.

My only TdF letdown this year? I didn't manage to get as much spindling done as I wanted to.

I only managed to get through 10 gr (of 78 gr) of cashmere carding waste. But I've made a good start on it, so I'm going to keep trucking!

So how did your Tour de Fleece come out? Did you meet your goals? And are you going to keep spinning? My wrist is due for a bit of a rest, although spindling is ok, so I think I'm going to get back to that knitting thing and start using up some of this new stash. 

Baptismal hedgie

Last weekend, I went to the first christening I've been to in approximately 30 years. This being an English christening, I was, of course, a bit concerned about the proper etiquette of gifts. So off I toddled to the John Lewis page of christening gifts.

Blergh. What a load of unnecessary and unispired rubbish. Plus, £95 for a sterling silver box for a lock of hair? No. Just...no.

By this time it was Wednesday, and time was getting short to come up with a gift before Saturday. It will come as a surprise to no one that I ended up grabbing the knitting needles and a bunch of scrap yarn, and came up with this adorable little creature, hiding in the barn Himself built:

Who's that?

Why, I do believe it's one of Mrs. Tiggywinkle's relations...

Be brave little guy, come on out...

Pattern: Knit Hedgehogs from the Purl Bee blog.
Yarn: leftover Cascade 220 from my Christmas slippers and some Knitpicks WotA Sport in natural, both held doubled
Needles: US 10.5/6.5 mm and US 8/5 mm
Start/finish: 5 June 2013-7 June 2013 (it took that long because I had to spin/dye some bulky weight for the eyes and nose).
Comments/mods: I changed the yarn weight and the needle size to fit what I had in the stash, but knit it as written. Lovely, quick little gift option, even if Himself pointed out that it looks more like an armadillo...

I suspect there will be more of these in my future, since Boo found it awfully hard to let this one go!

Fiber Friday: Welsh Clouds

A few months back, I picked up some of Katie's handcarded, dizzed gradient roving at Unravel, and I'd been looking for the perfect project for it ever since.

When Brenda's new shawl pattern popped up in the most recent issue of Knitty, I was pretty sure I'd found that project. So I sat down and treated myself to spinning up this fabulous fiber.

Fiber: Hilltop Cloud Gradient Roving in "Peacock", 30% Shetland/50% merino/20% Tussah silk (she's got more available - go now!).
Spun/plied: 15:1 on ST Lendrum
Stats: 233 yds/100 gr, or approximately 1065 ypp. Also known as DK-to-light-worsted weight.

This fiber was an absolute dream to spin. The Shetland and the silk more then make up for the merino (not the most interesting fiber to spin IMHO). There were four braids with the same color progression, so I spun the singles with two braids held together, occasionally concentrating on one or the other to get the colors finished at the same time. I then plied the two singles together and ended up with only a few yards difference at the end. Result!

Not the most even, consistent spin I've ever done, but boy was it enjoyable. The final yarn is soft, bouncy and elastic, with just a bit of shine. I think it's going to make an incredibly drapey fabric, which is perfect.

But (and you knew there was a but coming, didn't you? My plans never work out that well...), the shawl pattern in question calls for 600 yds of fingering weight yarn, not 200 yds of DK weight, so this lovely skein will have to become something else. What exactly remains to be seen, although Amy had been tweeting lots of pictures of some crocheted shawl gorgeousness that might work for this skein.

I'm still determined to do Now in a Minute in handspun...I think maybe I will have to bust up my 5 bags of Hello Yarn Winter Storage Finn and end up with a pink and green version...how very Preppy Handbook of me!

What a week!

It's a bit difficult for me to believe that Friday has finally arrived, and I'm still more or less in one piece (barring my still-injured right hip, but the less said about that, the better). It started with a lovely Mother's Day, marred by bad news (more on that next week), then the build up to a shop update (always tiring), then a lovely trip to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia yesterday, and culminating in a fabulous morning doing a spinning demo at the Campaign for Wool's Wool House exhibit at Somerset House. I'm exhausted!

Since there has been so much this week, I'm going to spread out the events over several posts, otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long. Let's start with the easiest first: The Spring Knitting and Stitching show at Olympia Kensington, running from 14th-17th March. I went to the Ally Pally K&S Show in October, 2011, but I had an even better time this go around. Maybe it was because I had company, maybe it was because I managed to find some goodies to take home. In any event, Alli and I had a fabulous time.

We arrived promptly at 10:00, and headed inside. First up were the quilts. Many, many amazingly fantastic and glorious quilts. Here are a few of my favorites.






More pictures in this Flickr set. After the quilts, we did a strategic walk through of the entire show. Which is to say, we wandered up and down the aisles dreamily for a couple of hours.

I first fell off the wagon at the Textile Garden button booth. Alli actually wandered off for a while because I was so obsessed. I came home with plenty of buttons for at least 5 sweaters...

That's ten buttons each of five different styles.

I love the jumping sheep (hello baby sweaters!), and the others are all slated for various sweater designs.

Next falling-down point: a pile of bagged yarn at Black Sheep Wools. And Alli actually did fall down in it to reach a particularly fetching shade of red (sadly I was not quick enough on the draw to snap a photo).


Bags and bags and bags of wool. I ended up with three bags (oops). Two bags of Rowan Wool Silk DK in a lovely pale lilac.

And one bag of orange (!!!) Luxury Cotton DK - Alli insisted it was my color.

I keep telling myself that my fascination with orange is a recent thing, but clearly that is not the case. It might be time for me to actually make myself a freakin' orange sweater just to get it out of my system.
Final purchase: an alpaca dress (!!!!) from Toft Alpacas. No picture taken at the time, but you can see me wearing it today at Wool House and babbling on about my miniSpinner. More on that next post...