Camping on the Isle of Wight

Our first holiday in two years, very excited to be going away.  We were up at the crack of dawn and the car was packed up with all the camping gear and we were on the road for 6am on Monday morning.  Our holiday was Monday to Friday with the touristy kind of things being done on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  It was a nice drive down to Lymington, where we caught a ferry to Yarmouth, which is on the North side of the Island but towards the West.

We had a hard time pitching the tent because the ground was so hard and dry as we've not had rain for weeks, its been very hot and the ground and grass is parched.  We broke or bent a lot of tent pegs trying to get the tent up and luckily the onsite shop sells good quality tent pegs, better than the ones we had.  After a lot of "naughty words" being said by hubby and after using water to wet the ground where we needed to hammer the pegs in we finally got the tent up and settled in.  Not a bad view at all.  The campsite is Grange Farm, Brighstone Bay, and if you click to their website you will see a picture down the right hand side, an aerial shot of the campsite.  Note the white static holiday homes that look closest to the water, we were just above them.

The photos above show the view from the tent looking towards the sea.  I went up the bench at the end and took these others photos later on, during sunset.  The top one is looking down to the sea slightly to the right, then looking down slightly to the coastline to the left and towards the South of the Island and see how the static holiday homes are below us and finally, looking along the coastline to the right towards the north of the Island.

During our holiday we visited:

Shanklin Coastal Path: a nice walk along the quiet Coastal Path which sits above the sheer drop to the sea on the left and the houses on the right.  Some of the houses are beautiful but I dread to think how much they would cost because of their size, location and views.  We would need to win the Lottery!

Shanklin Chine: this is basically a deep narrow ravine with water running down to the sea which has been turned into a garden-tourist attraction.  You can read all about Shanklin Chine here.

Alum Bay: this is famous for its natural multi-coloured sands and you have to be careful in case of rock fall.  The sand is collected and sold from the natural rock falls, it is not mined, and so not all colours are available at all times.  They also make their world renowned Alum Bay Glass.

The Needles and the Old Battery:  The Needles are the distinctive rocks and the Old Battery is the old Military Defence Base protecting mainland England from attacks along the south coast.  We didn't have the time nor the energy to also visit the New Battery.   You can find out more about these two sites here.

Godshill Model Village:  This is a model village of Godshill and surrounding area, including Shanklin Chine. The hubby and the kids loved this.  Within the model village there is a model of the model village complete with tourists and within that a model of the model village and within that a model of the model village and so on.  This is the photo top right.  Here is the link to the website.

Godshill Village: This is itself a tourist attraction but my family wouldn't stop and pose for photos so I apologise for the backs of their heads.

The journey home on the Friday was pretty horrendous, lots and lots of traffic and it was hot, very hot and it took us at least 2 hours more to get home than it did to get to our holiday.  Still lots of things on the Island that we didn't do, lots of things to see and do on the North East part of the Island so I think we will be going back to the Isle of Wight next year but finding a campsite up on the North East side as Grange Farm is lovely, very nice and quiet with their 10pm-7am quiet rule (no music/noise/shouting allowed during those times) but it is quite remote so if you fancy getting a take away, like fish and chips, it is literally about 9 miles to the nearest place.

I took lots of photos and a lot of photos of rocks, plants, bugs etc but I don't want to bore you to tears with those.

I've bought some small amounts of fibre

I know that I want to buy myself a blending hackle so that I can start making my own interesting blends of fibre for spinning because trying to add sparkle or other bits and pieces as you go along is really difficult and its almost impossible to do it on my wool combs.  I'm in the middle of researching which one will be best for me so I've started buying packs of fibre specifically for this reason.  They are sold by most places that sell spinning fibre and are usually small amounts of left overs, lap waste or sometimes specifically put together and sold for this purpose.

The first is an Ingredients Box from my regular fibre supplier in colourway Forget-me-not: The pack contains: 20g each of three shades of Tussah Silk, 10g each of two shades of Silk Noil, 10g each of two shades of Hemp, 10g each of two shades of Firestar (Trilobal Nylon) and 1g each of two shades of Angelina (in the little bags)

The second pack are small amounts of blended fibre either from where she has been trialling blends or left overs from blends she's put together for the shop or fibre clubs.  You can't choose what colours you get, she just sells them from time to time as random bags containing a certain weight and this is good just to have lots of options in your stash.  The only draw back is that you don't know exactly what each one is or what fibres they contain but other than that its a fun purchase.

Dyeing the Llanwenog fleece

Further to my post a few days ago about buying and washing the Llanwenog fleece.  After it was washed and dried it weighed 1332g, down from the 1714g dirty fleece weight.  I've decided to split this into 4 parts. 

When I talk about dye depth percentages, this is the weight relationship between dry fleece and dye powder so a 1% dye depth, the standard colour depth, is 1g of dye for every 100g of dry fleece.  To achieve a dark shade you use more dye, such as a 2% dye depth and to get a lighter shade you use less dye.

I was using Greener Shades Dyes, which are my favourite dyes that I have used so far. 

I took 400g of fleece, which was the blue stained part of the fleece plus some of the white fleece, and dyed this blue using Coral Reef Aqua at a dye depth of 0.5% to achieve a lighter shade than normal but still dark enough to cover up the staining. 

The rust colour I made up at a dye depth of 0.5% using three different colours of dye: 50% Flame Red, 25% Amethyst Purple, 25% Sunset Orange.  I used 400g of white fleece on that.

The pale green was achieved using a dye depth of just 0.2%, made up of two colours of dye: 75% River Blue, 25% Sunshine Yellow and this was on 270g of white fleece.

The remaining 262g of white fleece has been left undyed.

I definitely love the blue and the green.  The rust colour was a bit of a surprise as I had to substitute one of the dyes that I should have used, as called for in the "recipe book" for another slightly different colour as I had run out of one of the colours so I wasn't sure what it was going to turn out like.

I bought a Llanwenog sheep's fleece

Llanwenog, rolls off the tongue doesn't it.  Llanwenog, Llanwenog, Llanwenog.  Great name for a Welsh breed of sheep.  I've been interested in trying this breed for some time now but its quite rare and the last couple of years I've either had plenty of fleece already waiting to be made into yarn, not had the money to spend on fleece (that I don't really need) or, as in last year, not being well enough to tackle the job of cleaning a fleece.

This one has come from a farm near Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire and the pre-wash weight is 1.7kg.

This arrived yesterday and I've washed it today but unfortunately the farmers sheep markers have not washed out but I did isolate that section and washed it separately so that I could keep the stained fibres together.  Some of it did wash out a bit so its not as heavily stained but it will need to be dyed properly with my dyes as it will never wash out fully.  I might dye quite a bit of this fleece in different colours before combing it and see what interesting yarns I can make.

July's Fibre is here - South Africa

I was very apprehensive about what July's fibre package would look like after receiving the letter a few days ago, being inspired by the South African flag, but I have to say that I am very happy with it.  Its gorgeous.  Not only is it incredibly soft but the colours are amazing.  The fibre is 62.5% Bluefaced Leicester wool and 37.5% Bamboo.

It is more black, like the first photo, but the colours are difficult to capture correctly due to how shiny the fibres are.  I don't think it will take me very long to spin this one up, weather permitting, as there is no way that I will spin this up whilst its humid, it could very well felt in my hands if I tried.

Spinning up Rennie Macintosh

I wasn't quite so enthusiastic about spinning up the second package I got from the fibre club, I'm not a fan of pink to be honest, and I've had a bad cold so I was struggling to do anything but I finally bit the bullet and just got on and spun it up. 

I split it in half across its length for each single (strand) and then broke each half down into lots of strips along its length, with each strip having lots of colours with some strips being more pink, some more green-yellow and some more blue-lilac, making sure I mixed them up as bit as I spun them to ensure a constantly colour changing single.  When I plied the singles this gave a yarn that, at first glance appears to be one overall colour, pink, but when you actually look at it it is made up of lots of subtly changing shades.

Its not as soft as Mardi Gras, the first package, but its not too bad and should be able to be worn next to the skin.  Its come out at 318m of sport weight yarn and its 50% Shetland Wool, 50% Corriedale Wool.

July's Fibre Club Letter

About 1pm today I had an e-mail come through that I got really excited about.  Yep, the e-mail from the Fibre Club with the letter giving details of the theme and clues about the colour.

The letter reads:

July 18th is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, so we’re going to South Africa for our colour inspiration this month. 

Your fibre has been inspired by the modern-day South African flag. In 1994 apartheid ended, free elections were held, and Nelson Mandela was elected president. A new flag was required, to signal a new beginning for the country. At the time it was the only national flag to use 6 colours in its design, it was described as being a Rainbow Flag for the Rainbow Nation, a term used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa. 

The current flag contains elements of many of the previous flags of south Africa and was designed to represent all of the people of South Africa. It was originally only an interim flag and a competition was held to design the new flag for the country, however no designs found favour (New Zealand also had a public competition to suggest new flag designs, some of the entries are spectacular!). 

Use of the previous pre-apartheid flag is still causing racial divisions. Those who choose to fly it often use it to signal a desire to return to the previous conditions under apartheid where black people were second-class citizens. 

The design of the new flag contains elements of previous South African flags. The blue band at the bottom and the chilli red at the top are from the old pre-apartheid flag, which itself is based on the British flag, and the Dutch flag. The remaining green, gold and black come from the colours used by the ANC (African National Congress), the political party of Nelson Mandela, and other anti-apartheid political parties. The green shape represents the coming together of both sides of South African politics, and that they are now one nation. 

I can't wait to see what this one will look like, it will be interesting to see when it arrives as the South African flag, below, is very colourful and I don't usually like overly colourful braids of fibre, they scare me a little as I struggle to envisage what they might look like when they are spun.

I am hoping that the gold is represented by sparkly gold strands within the braid as this will give interest and light to what could be quite a dark braid of spinning fibre.