Wicked!!

Just got back from an evening out at Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre to see Wicked.  This kids had no idea where we were going until we parked up and started walking towards the theatre, or what we were going to see.  We kept it a big big surprise.

I have to say that this show is absolutely amazing with some fabulously colourful and creative costumes.  It stars Amy Ross as Elphaba, Helen Woolf as Glinda, Adam Sidwell (Steven Beale from Eastenders) as Fiyero, Kim Ismay (Claudia from Not Going Out) as Madame Morrible, Steven Pinder (Max Farnham from Brookside) as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Doctor Dillamond, Emily Shaw as Nessarose and Iddon Jones as Boq.

If it comes to a theatre near you, try to go and see it, you won't be disappointed.

Shetland Top - Lilac sparkles

I have a large braid of Shetland combed top that appears to be compacted, that's another one from the same supplier that is compacted.  Its probably no surprise that they are no longer trading.  The only way to deal with this is to put it through my wool combs and make the best of a bad job.

It started out as 240g but after combing I have about 130g of hand combed top to use.  I decided to add some sparkle to this but I can't blend it in with the combs so will have to just add it as I spin it.

I now have a lovely skein of sparkly sport weight Shetland that is 91.5% Shetland wool, 8.5% Angelina (sparkles) and is 142g/302m.

I have one more braid from this supplier to work through at some point in the not too distant future.

Parcel of Fibre from World of Wool

I have treated myself to a range of commercial ready-to-spin fibres from World of Wool.

I've bought a couple with the intention of spinning these as they are, a sample pack of British Breeds because I've heard a lot about some of those included in this pack but not sure if they're right for me and my needs and I don't want to fork out on buying a whole or part fleece only to discover its not for me, and the rest I've bought with the intention of using as ingredients with other fibres to create my own blends, although this means that I will have to look at buying dyes specifically for plant based fibres because I only have dyes for animal protein fibres.

The first one is 100g of 50% Polwarth, 25% Alpaca, 25% Silk and the last one is 100g of Zwartbles combed top as I wanted to try Zwartbles again following the poor quality fleece I had the unfortunate opportunity of processing previously.  The samples of British Breeds contain 25g each of Dorset Horn, Whitefaced Woodland, Moorit Shetland, Brown Bluefaced Leicester, Light Grey Herdwick, Light Grey Swaledale, Black Welsh and Black Jacob.

Dorset Horn I have only tried previously as a cross breed fleece I had.  Shetland I have had a few times but never in the Moorit colour.  Bluefaced Leicester I have spun once before, back in my early days of spinning and Black Jacob, well, I've spun lots of Jacob fleece, I've probably spun more Jacob than anything else.  The other breeds, Whitefaced Woodland, Herdwck, Swaledale and Black Welsh I have never spun before so it will be interesting to see how they handle.

The Merino/Suri Alpaca blend I might spin that and then dye it afterwards, not sure yet exactly what I will do with that.  The other fibres are all plant fibres and can be used blended with each other or I can blend them with any of the fleece as I process them.  These will become part of an "ingredients box" along with the various colours of Angelina that I have.

Working on a Romney fleece

I need to be quicker at processing fleece and spinning it up because I actually bought this fleece back in August 2012 and I am only now working on it 5 1/2 years later.  That's a crazy amount of time to have a fleece and not do anything with it.

Romney, which used to be called Romney Marsh Sheep is a long-wool breed of sheep originating in Kent and is often referred to locally as a "Kent". 

When this arrived all those years ago it was rolled up and took me some time to figure out how to open it out.  It had lots of sheep marker on it in different colours.  I'm not sure if this was spray marker used for marking sheep that are pregnant/how many lambs they're having or whether some of this was from the raddle that is strapped to a Rams chest and marks the Ewe during mating.

Its a Ewe fleece and weighed 3.4kg before skirting and washing.  After washing it weighed 2.175kg.  I'm not sure if its because it's been stored for so long or whether its just me being so much more experienced and picky about the fleece that I am prepared to put the effort in make into yarn but this is far more coarser than I recall.  This is another fleece where I ended up binning most of it and only keeping the best fibres from the fleece so from the 2.175kg that was waiting to be combed, I only actually have 362g of hand-combed top for spinning.

By the end of sorting out all that fleece and only coming away with such a small amount of swag I was quite disappointed and fed up with the whole thing so I spun it up very quickly and quite thick to get it out of my sight as quick as possible.  Three skeins of Aran weight yarn that I forgot to take photos of as this point.

I tried dyeing the yarn with the natural liquid dye kept from the boiled up carrot tops from last year and using the appropriate mordant it should have dyed the yarn green but it didn't work, it smelt rancid and stunk the house out.  I had to open doors and windows to try to vent the house and I also used one of the wax melts that I had for Christmas to make the house smell nice again.  I can't find anything anywhere about how long natural dyes from plant material will store for other than the statement "store until ready to use", but clearly 10 months is too long and I would imagine it needs to be used within about a month of making it.

I had to rinse the yarn really well and over-dye it using my Greener Shades Dye and I chose Ruby Red.

I love the colour these have turned out.  These are all aran weight and this one 128g/137m

This one is 117g/148m

and this one is 106g/105m

Blue Cotton Wrap - Design SB188

I've received some feedback recently, absolutely glowing feedback, but in that feedback my customer stated that she hopes that I make some more cotton wraps soon.  Well, after a lot of searching I have finally found some cotton yarns here in the UK that are thick enough for the design that she bought from me and also for another wrap that I sold a while back that was also made from cotton yarn.  There seems to be an abundance of choice in the USA but not so much here in the UK and with shipping and import tax it makes it too expensive to import it in from the USA.

The yarn is King Cole Whopper Cotton and the colour is Azure.

It didn't take very long to make this wrap but the problem I have with super chunky yarns like this one is that tires my hands out very quickly and makes them ache a bit.  I do have a touch of Arthritis in my right hand and I normally wear a support glove pretty much 24/7 but I do take it off for certain tasks and working this yarn didn't help.  Maybe I need to work slower or have shorter work time and longer breaks when using super chunky yarns to prevent the strain on my hands.

The above photos show it during the blocking process.  It may look darker in some photos but that is because it's wet.

The photo top right shows how it might look when held together with a shawl pin, which I don't have, and which is why I popped the tip of the shawl through one of the lace holes as an improvise.

Vintage Daisy Shawl - Design DK428

I recently made 3/4 of a shawl when I realised that I didn't have enough yarn to finish it and it wouldn't have looked right if I had made it shorter than the pattern.  I also realised that it didn't have enough drape either, it was too stiff for this design and that was down to gauge.

I undone the entire thing, about 2 weeks work, and found another design to use the yarn with.  I had a few issues with this design as there aren't any photos that show how the motifs are joined together or what the finished shawl looks like other than the one photo on the vintage pattern that just shows it from the front and draped over the arms of the model.

Each motif consists of 6 rounds of crochet, with the 6th round being the one where you join to other motifs, and then you have to crochet round the whole thing once finished to make the nice edging.

Made from some of my own hand spun Polwarth wool that I spun back in 2012.

Before and after fringe being added.

Its been blocked and is modelled by my teenage daughter.  It reminds me of a giant dreamcatcher and I think its beautiful.

LF433 - Remember Me

My youngest daughter, who is on the Autistic Scale, has recently had to attend special workshop groups to teach her methods of how to cope with difficult situations that may be stressful, frustrating or emotional.  People with Autism really struggle with these things.  Whilst she was in the workshop group I sat in a lovely quiet part of the waiting area and crocheted, or at least I tried to crochet as much as I could but there was one woman, one of the workers that I will refer to as "gas bag", that kept talking to me every week incessantly about how I think my daughter is doing and probing into my feelings, she never shut up and never took the hint until the last week when I was very abrupt with her.  There is only so much a person can say on a subject and I'd said all I needed to by the end of the second week, which was weeks ago!

So, the project that I was working on, or trying to work on, was another Twilley's Goldfingering 1970's shawl and I kept this project just for the group sessions which meant that I started making the flower centres way back on 28th February and I started adding the petals on the 5th week of the group, getting 3 flowers complete in about an hour and a half.  The last week, the one where I got peace and quiet, I got 10 flowers completed in the same time, which shows how much of a distraction this gas bag was!

I am using all vintage threads for this, vintage silver for the flower centres, vintage red for the petals and vintage black for the main body.

It wasn't until I was crocheting with the black that I noticed that two of the flowers had 9 petals each and not the 8 that was needed so I had to undo the petals and correct them.  No doubt these are two of the three that I done when gas bag was talking to me.

I refer to this particular shawl as "remember me" because it reminds me of Remembrance Sunday and the parades that go with that.