Links and Paths and Luck

I can't get over how things are invisibly linked in your life without you even knowing about it.  None of us exist in isolation and this was proved to me just today.

I recently sold a couple of items on Etsy to a lovely crafter in Fife - Aileen Clarke.  She lives not twenty miles from me.  What she did with my fibre really blew me away.  I feel like she took my creativity, added her own and the total was greater than the sum of its parts.  She is a real artist and I feel privileged that she chose to use my fibre in her work.

Anyway, enough with the gushing!  This is what she bought from my Etsy shop, SnowdaySpinning

Silk and Merino hand carded batt

Hand dyed silk hankies in blues and greens 

and this beautiful creation is what she made with it all......

Glorious, isn't it??

I know that you are now champing at the bit, saying, 'for God's sake tell me where she sells her stuff!!'  Well, since you asked so nicely.....

Aileen sells both from her website at  and also on Etsy, where you'll find her at Aileen Clarke Crafts

I dare you to have a look at her stuff and not want to buy at least five things - I know I did!!

Happy Spinning - and Felting!

Food memories - Jean's Meatloaf

This blog isn't always going to be about spinning.  No-one's one dimensional and I'm no different to anyone else.  I love food as well as fibre, so occasionally, I'll be throwing out a few recipes for stuff I love.  Hope you enjoy!

This meatloaf is a moveable feast that is always delicious.  I've been making it for over twenty years and have never served it to anyone without them asking for the recipe.  I'm almost embarrassed to tell them how to make it; it's so simple.  But delicious.  So delicious.  And the sandwiches it makes the day after are out of this world.

This is my mum in law's meatloaf.  Jean was one of a kind and I loved and love her very much.  

Half as much finely chopped streaky smoked bacon to however much leftover roast chicken or turkey you have to hand.  One packet of bread sauce mix (I know, I know, but trust me!).  3-4 eggs or more if you are making a larger quantity.  You need enough egg to make the mix feel very slightly sloppy when you mix it, but not runny with egg.

If you should have any little pockets of jellified juices in the corner of the roasting tray, add them to the mix, too.  It's all delicious flavour.

Turn out the mixture into a loaf tin - or two if you've got a lot of mixture - lined with a greaseproof paper liner.  Do not use foil.  Repeat - Do. Not. Use. Foil.  It will stick like sticky stuff on a particularly sticky day.

Bake at Gas 5, 180 degrees C, 360 degrees F, until golden brown.  When you insert a thin-bladed knife and pull it out to touch it, it should feel uncomfortably hot.

Let cool a little and serve with either mashed potatoes and more bread sauce and peas or with little cubes of roasted garlic and rosemary potatoes.  Either way it's delish!  It slices better the next day once things have settled a bit and cooled, but even hot and crumbly it's amazing.

And now I know what I want for dinner tonight........

Happy Spinning - and Eating!

Passing it On

I have a very cool daughter.  She knows who she is and is full of justified confidence and beauty.  But she doesn't knit very much.  Somehow, I manage to love her anyway.

This Christmas, she went through a spurt of knitting enthusiasm when she was home over the festive period, but it waned, as it always tends to.

She had wanted to knit a cosy blanket.  She shares my loathing of ever being cold.  So, I took the five big squares she had knitted and stuffed into a basket alongside my stash - a mixture of acrylic, millspun and hanspun yarns in shades of turquoise and blues and greys - and added a new square of my own.  I bordered them each with one block of log cabin and then put it all together.

The seaming was a little hampered by our Westie deciding to sleep on the squares as I was sewing, but eventually, after much shoogling and persuading, that part was finished.

The mischief-maker in question - Deil, the Westie

One final block of log cabin around the very edge and it was done.  A collaborative project to keep her toes warm or sit across our knees while we watch RuPaul's Drag Race and drink chai together on the sofa.

So, I haven't passed the knitting and spinning bug onto my daughter.  She might take it up later, she might never lay hands on needles again.  It doesn't matter.  After all, non-knitters are people, too :o)

One thing I have found is that I'm passing my skills backwards instead of forwards - back to my mum instead of onward to my child.

My Mum was always a brilliant knitter, but has steadily gravitated towards simpler projects as she's gotten older.  But I've introduced her to knitting on circulars to take the strain from her arthritic wrists and she's mastered mitered squares for cosy blankets for her grandkids and great-grandkids.  She's even almost got the hang of applied i-cord.  She loves Elizabeth Zimmermann - the DVD's I loaned to her and the books that hold all the wonderful, timeless EZ patterns and she calls her 'that clever woman'.

So, it's not always about passing on our passions and fiber creativity onto the next generation; there are others who've come before who we can teach as we learn from their journey.  Teaching someone a new technique schools you as much as it does them.

The Great Cardigan Adventure

It started with an idea.

My husband is always hot stuff.  In every way.  He gets too overheated wearing full jumpers unless we're talking 15 degrees below outside or he's ill.  He's already got a sweater made from a combination of silk and wool which he loves and looks especially cute in.  It's from Knits Men Want by Bruce Weinstein.  If you knit for a man you love and want to make him something he'll actually want to wear rather than feel obliged to - treat yourself and buy or borrow a copy.

Anyway, after this sweater came the idea of making him a cardigan out of my handspun.  So far, so good.  I have some lovely Jacob yarn in a light double knit kind of weight already spun up - would that do?  Hmmmm, not quite right.  Some Shetland, then?  Spun fine so as not to be too warm?  Yeah, no.

And then the summer crop of fleeces started to arrive and in amongst the bounty was a lovely coloured Ryeland fleece.

Really delicious colours - you can see that from the photos.  Deep chocolate brown, lighter browns, dark greys and flashes of lighter grey.  When it's all carded together into batts, the colours blend and weave together harmoniously.  We had a winner.

But.  This stuff is not the most fun I've ever had spinning.  I prefer a mid to long staple fleece and this stuff is short - only two inches at the max.  And there are lumps and bumps everywhere in the batts.  Surely this will make an inferior yarn, I thought?  Turns out, no.  I set to work on my ever-ready Ashford Kiwi and I have to say that the finished yarn is squishy, bouncy and just wants to be petted once it's in the skein.  It's also heavier than I ever thought I'd knit up for any garment I'd ever make for him - an aran weight at an educated guess.

I'm 5 skeins - almost 6 -  in to the adventure.  Soon it'll be time to start swatching for the cardigan.  Again the unexpected strikes.  Makes life interesting, doesn't it?

Happy Sunday Spinning!

The Process.....

There are a lot of posts and discussions on Ravelry about spinning and there are gorgeous pictures of finished yarn and the projects that are made from this lovely stuff.  This post is a bit different.  I wanted to show how I take a bag of deliciously stinky fleece and transform it into actual knitting yarn.  That part of it still feels transformative and magic to me.  So, here is my process.  Yours might be different, but so long as we both end up with results that please us, does it matter?

New dyeing, new spinning, same old me

Silk hankies are the funnest thing to dye!!

I've been dyeing, spinning, dyeing, winding, spinning, fleece sorting, spinning, dyeing, knitting.   It's just a shame there needs to be time away from the wheels and fleece to go to work.  I mean, I like my job, but I can't exactly keep my wheel by my desk........or can I???

It's fascinating how different fibres take colour differently.  Silk sucks colour up like a thirsty kid with a milkshake.

Another thing I've found is that the colours I might think I need to make up a certain shade on fleece aren't necessarily the ones you'd imagine.  Colour is unpredictable and that's one of the reasons I love dyeing so much.

I just dyed up a batch of Shetland fibre for a shawl in a beautiful blue.  The shades of blue I was going for were heathery and kind of blurred.  I used two shades of grey and also black - no blue dye went anywhere near the pot - weird, right?

This is my favourite batch of hankies for the shop so far - it's like a Turner seascape.

Dervish

This is the beginning of a series of posts which I hope will encourage me to spin more and work my way through the huge stash of fleece and fibre I currently have.  I'm too chicken to try out the TDF this year on Rav, but there's always next year. 

So, this weekend, I had the luxury of time and I combed bumps of fibre with my mini Valkyrie combs.  I turned the bumps into a sparkly, bouncy two ply double knitting weight yarn.  I think there's about 130g there altogether.  The sparkle was what hooked me.  It's a kind of sea green/blue - think Vegas Mermaid.



Bumble Bee Exotic Blend from http://www.worldofwool.co.uk/

 I'd also treated myself to three 100g lengths of tops from World of Wool a little while back.  The Bumble Bee colourway was the first one I tackled and turned out to be a bit of a surprise.  I'd thought it would turn out yellow and black, but not so much!  It's a lovely, deep, lustrous green.  I think it's the silk in the fibre which gives the lovely sheen and I tried to bring this out by thwacking the washed skein on the side of the sink a few times.  Think it worked well and I'll add photos very soon.  I'm actually tempted to buy some more so that I have a usable amount of yarn, instead of the 97g I've ended up with. 

I'm trying to get better at adding photos to Rav and this blog, so hopefully more photos of fibre and finished yarn will follow. 

disappointment

**warning -this post contains swearing.....much, much swearing******

****consider yourself warned!*****


I was supposed to be attending the Jared Flood seamless sweater design workshop yesterday as part of the Knit Camp 2010 festivities. Yeah, well that didn't happen. I've been pretty neutral on the Ravelry boards since I dislike how it makes us look as a knitting community if we all indulge in a bit of 'let's pile on and trash the bitch'. Well, I say neutral, but what I really mean is I've been trying to make my point in a firm way without resorting to saying what I really wanted to which was:

"What the fuck! How can you get away with treating people like this, you clueless cow?"

When I called at 9:30 on Monday evening to see if the event was going ahead the next day, the lady I spoke to was pretty calm, sounded a bit stressed I suppose and she told me my Tuesday class was being put forward one day to Wednesday 'would that cause me a problem?'. Yes, when you work full time and have specifically arranged one fucking day to attend a workshop with a freaking knitting hero of yours, moving the agreed date is a bit of an inconvenience, actually! I have meetings and commitments today, Thursday and Friday, so I was screwed. I hope everyone who goes has a fantastic time. I'll be there on Saturday with my mad knitting crew, but I'm gutted to be missing Jared and I'm just so fucking angry at the way we have been treated.

Lady needs to learn the art of communication....and fast.

busy doesn't cover it!

since we've been back (a whole 2 days now) I've been crafting like a demon in our sweatshop - sorry dining room. I've made a little collection of felted leaf and flower brooches and I've just listed a new item on Folksy.com - a cute cream felted bowl. Life is busy, busy. I still have the order for Texere to finish up and I need to check whether anything from the little collection I put into another shop has sold yet. Nervous about that, but still excited! Things seem to have really taken off in a small but exciting way for me with the shop and I'm hoping when the mention in next months's Yarn Forward is taken into account, sales might just start to creep up and up. I can hope anyway!

It's not that I don't like my job, it's just that doing what I'm doing with MY company and MY time and using MY skills is just so satisfying, I can't help but wish I could spend more time on it.

Here's hoping you all get to spend more time doing what you really love in the next little while :o)

In the meantime, here's a little taste of what I've been up to.......

cakes and knitting

Just got back from Cambridge yesterday where we were camping at a lovely spot. Lovely weather - so much so that I actually sport a colour other than 'peely-wally'. Saw some beautiful sights, ate some lovely cake, was in danger of lamping students in Cambridge itself if they had asked me one more time whether I wanted to punt down the river. Good clean cake-filled fun.

I knitted, too - the Pi Shawl above is from EZ's lexicon in single ply icelandic. Love that stuff. You have to be a little bit 'ginger' with it while you're knitting, but it seems to make your brain send signals to your fingers to be gentle and relax. I strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't already tried it out. And it's cheap as chips! The other pics are from Ely Cathedral. Amazing place - we loved it so much, we went twice.

Glad to be home now, but not glad at the size of the pile of washing awaiting me :o(

just the one

Forgot I had this one of my mum in her Christmas present. I'll upload it to Ravelry when I'm feeling better, but here it is for now - Mum in her Opal sock yarn Ishbel

and here's the other bit of Christmas knitting, Dad's feet in his Christmas socks (I can't believe it's taken me to July to upload these!!!!)

stinking cold

I'm at home off work with the aforementioned stinking cold. I can't even knit to cheer myself up since I can't put my glasses on, my eyes and nose are running so much. TMI, I know, but I have to give you the full picture so you sympathise! I'm sneaking five minutes online before I go for a nap. Don't have any knitting photos to show off, but thought I'd show another garden photo, just to prove I'm still alive and blogging :o)

As soon as this stinky cold has gone, I'm going to be putting some of my knitted and beaded stuff on sale in a local library - Duloch library, if any of my followers are in Fife and fancy a look. I might see if I can get a snap of the little cabinet once it's all loaded up with my brooches and baby shoes and button brooches and felted bowls......now you're curious!

see you all on the other side of the sniffles.....

C.

Folksy birthday!

As promised over on Ravelry, here are some pics of the lovely things I chose for my daughter's birthday today:

Lovely mini handbound book in moroccan leather from Oscar Cat Designs on Folksy







THE cutest owl in the whole world courtesy of entanglewood on Folksy









A set of beautiful sleepy owl cards from gooseberrymoon on Folksy








fantastic camera badges from Mighty Thrifty on Folksy










lovely, delicate turquoise rose earrings from Realicoul on Folksy








Quirky camera earrings - really detailed and unusual from Purple Schmurple on Folksy







sweet, sweet polka dot hairgrips from Concept Design Form on Folksy







the sweetest westie badge from Forever Foxed on Folksy









and the most delicious ginger lip balm from ameliorate on Folksy








and finally, the most original little painted mirror from Superfumi on Folksy







all I need to say is - who needs chainstores????

this and that

The 'this' in this post, if you see what I mean is another baby thing (or two). Hope you're not getting bored looking at them, because I'm aiming to knit right through my stash this year and there'll be a lot more baby stuff coming!! This is a baby skirt I designed (if you can call it that, it was so simple). I think I'll knit up another one and write out the pattern to post on Ravelry. I've used enough free patterns in my time that it's probably about time I gave a couple back to the knitting community :o)


This is my 5th tomten jacket. If there's anyone reading this who knits and who doesn't know Elizabeth Zimmermann, do yourself a favour and buy a copy of the Knitter's Almanac. You can pick it up easily for only a few pounds and if you're anything like me, it'll change the way you think about knitting for good. The jacket is so simple but so satisfying to knit and I never get bored of making it. The hood is so cute when you see it actually on the small person you made it for!












The 'that' is another load of photos, but this time of the gorgeous flowers out in my garden at this time of year. Scott (the husband) is a mad keen, fantastic gardener and these are just some of the beauties he's grown. I like the photo of the clematis especially since it's the first time I've ever taken a picture of a bee. I wanted to get it just as it emerged but then it flew towards me and I got scared. I am a wuss and I am not ashamed :o)

All the roses in our garden (6 varieties) are heavily scented. A rose without a perfume is such a disappointment. The big pink one in the photo is my daughter's rose and smells of baby powder!

Speaking of the daughter, I'm just about to go put pizza in the over for her and her friends since they're all coming over for dinner to celebrate her 14th birthday. My girl is 14. How did that happen??

Happy Birthday Rhia!!

baby, baby, baby

A workmate is having a baby boy later this year and the sister of another workmate has just had a baby girl. Combine these facts with a stash that includes many, many single balls of yarn, not to mention scraps of yarn and I can see that there are going to be loads of baby things coming in my summer knitting. I'm going to knit another dress and write up the pattern for Ravelry. You like??

Look Ma - I've actually been knitting!

Just to prove that I know where the camera is and how it works :o)




This is one completely calorie-free cupcake. Damn, that doesn't sound appealing, does it? Pretty cute, if a bit fiddly. Can't complain about the pattern since it was a very well-put-together freebie from Ravelry. It's just that I'm fingers and thumbs when it comes to assembling small stuffed things!


These are a few of the stitch markers I've been wearing away my fingers making lately. It's a very addictive craft and people so far seem to like them, so that's good! I'm selling them through a couple of yarn shops - K1 in Edinburgh and Three Bags Full down in Halifax and also through my little Folksy shop. They are such fun to make - especially the Fimo cakes. It's like being a kid in a candy store!














If you're interested, nip over to my Folksy shop for a browse - there's loads of amazing stuff on offer there from makers all over the UK. Most of my daughter's birthday presents seem to have come from Folksy this year. So, the link is...
http://www.folksy.com/shops/snowday

I also had a bit of good luck a little while back when I won the Telegraph's travel writing competition. Not quite as grand as it sounds when you realise that they run the comp every week, but still. The prize was £200 and I'm going to enjoy spending every penny when we're down in Cambridge later next month - there are three yarn shops in Cambridge...I'm just saying ;o) If you're interested, the link for the travel piece is:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-writing-competition/7770807/Just-back-unearthing-a-Scottish-secret.html

a good yarn

just got back from the library knitting group. Well, just got back, had a mug of tea, whined about how irritating the new Jamie Oliver programme is and posted on Ravelry. (Aside: just play-yelled at daughter to 'get to bed!' and was told quite calmly 'shut up'. I love being a mum)

The group was big tonight - 21 people, I think and they are a great bunch. Didn't get half as long to chat as I wanted to, though. There need to be other knitting nights where I'm not worried about how many people turn up and how many books they borrow.

It's still a big 'told you so' to those in the library service who suspected the group would fail miserably, though. Not that I'm gloating. Because that would be petty. But so, so satisfying all the same :)

Don't care if I'm repeating myself here. I do love being a mum - especially the part where I wake her in the morning and get to sneak lots of kisses while she's still only half-awake.

bed now. tired.
C.

ishbell

Ishbell shawl by Ysolda Teague (www.ysolda.com/wordpress)

Finished in a weekend and love it - as you can see from the photo. Tennis elbow seems to be abating. Hooray!!

slowly, slowly

not been knitting up a storm as I usually am, recently. The tennis elbow has really slowed me down. It's annoying, but it's meant I've taken up a bit of sewing in the meantime while it heals. In fact, I think I may have developed a bit of a fabric as well as a fibre addiction.

We have enough Christmas fabric to make all the holiday ornaments, napkins and placemats we'll ever need, so that's good!

I'll post pictures of Christmas in progress soon.

It's also meant that I can finally display all the vintage hankies my Mum gave me. I have 12 so far - and might buy more from Ebay, but I'd really like the quilt to be made with only family hankies. That's right, I'm making hankies into a quilt. Look at http://www.ehow.com/how_2077800_make-handkerchief-quilt.html if you want to see how to make one. There's one hankie in the collection from when I went to Sunday school as a tot which is a bit mad and seventies, but that's only to be expected - since it WAS the seventies :)

I'm going to try to make this quilt a long term project so I don't rush to get it finished for a deadline and screw it up somehow. It will be lovely to put something on my bed which has so much sentimental meaning and history. Much better than the pile of hankies lingering in a drawer somewhere.

C.

KIP day in Dunfermline

Prizewinners from Dunfermline Carnegie Knit in Public Day event. Don't quite know how it happened, but the winning ladies were sitting beside one another - must have been lucky seats!

On the left, we have one of our best customers, Mrs Betty Healy and on the right is Ravelry's very own, MrsJollyJackTar. I want to see the socks when they're done!

So, we launched our new library knitting group for members of the public on Worldwide KIP day. Great success with a good mix of ages and knitting tastes. We had a complete newbie learn to knit at the event and evaluation from the morning has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to all the lovely knitters who turned up to support us on the day! Remember, the knitting group will be starting June 25th in Dunfermline Carnegie Library from 6-8pm and we'd love to see you there.