Another completed custom order - Design A197

Back in November I sold a shawlette to a customer and she contact me soon afterwards to ask if I could make another, exactly the same using the same yarn, but larger as it perfectly matches a Mantilla (Chapel Veil) that she intends to wear to her daughters first Holy Communion in May 2019 and that she wants to keep the shawlette already purchased so her daughter can wear it.

This posed me a bit of a problem as most of the yarns I use are either hand spun or vintage and in most cases if I don't have any left it is impossible to get more.  In this case it was some vintage Mohair called Charisma Luxury Fashion Mohair by Colours by Adrian of Edinburgh in shade Salmon.

I searched every where I could think of online and found nothing other than some very similar mohair and mohair-type yarns on Ebay and so I bought a few bits and pieces that might be a good match, which when they arrived they turned out not be such a good colour match after all.  Whilst waiting for some of these yarns to arrive I did finally manage to track some of the exact same yarn down, more expensive than what I paid for it originally but then the original yarn did come via Ebay, I do love a bargain, but this was coming from a shop that sells vintage yarns so is bound to be more expensive anyway.

After a little bit of back and forth regarding sizes and prices etc the order was placed and paid for with the instruction of not to rush, enjoy Christmas and to get it to her by the end of January if I could.  Brilliant, that gives me plenty of time to get it done.

Side by side of before and after washing and blocking.

My daughter modelling it for me to show off the size and pattern.  So pretty.

January's Fibre is here - Thin Blue Line

I'm a happy girl.  I love this one and I knew I'd love it after reading the letter.  It's definitely in my favourite colour range.  Thin Blue Line is very soft and squishy and is 62.5% Merino, 25% Sari Silk and 12.5% Bamboo.  The advice is to let the Sari Silk do its thing with the texture but I have spun Sari Silk before, in my own yarn that I called The Golden Carrot, a few months ago and I took my time when I got to the Sari Silk pieces to thin them out a bit so that I still had the splash of colour but not the bulky lumps.

I know that I am going to enjoy spinning this one up.

Januarys Fibre Club Letter

Ooooh, here we go, this one is earlier than usual for some reason as its only the 14th and we don't usually get the letters until around 19th or 20th of the month.

The letter reads:

We did this theme last year… but I then got enthused, so we’re revisiting it again! Space is such a rich vein of inspiration, and with the new year it seemed appropriate to look at our earth from a new perspective. 

Last January was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 5 mission which was the starting point for the moon landings. The Apollo programme wouldn’t have been possible without the work of an army of women, we’re only just beginning to publicly recognise their brilliance. Over Christmas we watched the 2016 film Hidden Figures, a biographical film about the black female mathematicians who were known as computers. My parents are both old enough to remember the space race, and neither had any idea about how the calculations were done to achieve space flight. Women ended up performing these as number crunchers because the men who had the mathematical ability required had ended up going to university and ended up as engineers. Women, particularly blank women were not given the same career opportunities. Many ended up working for NASA after first qualifying as teachers. Working as computers involved huge amounts of data calculation, as the first programmable electronic computers were developed many of these women became the first experts in programming these machines. The use of computer as a job title disappeared. 

The pioneering work of women with computers is by no means isolated to NASA, 20 years earlier Bletchley Park was a crucial part of Britain’s war effort. Over 75% of the people who worked there were women, but we now only tend to recall the male names. It was the women who were responsible for operating the Colossus and Bombe electronic code breaking machines. The secrecy surrounding the work done at Bletchley means that many of these women were never recognised in their own lifetime. 

Many of the women who worked on the NASA Apollo missions are now finally getting their work recognised. Probably one of the most famous is Katherine Johnson. Her calculations were critical to ensure the safe return of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. She carried on working at NASA throughout the Apollo missions, and at the start of the Space Shuttle Programme. In 2015 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Your fibre this month is called the Thin Blue Line, from space the earths atmosphere is revealed to be a narrow band around our planet. When looking towards the sun it appears to be a narrow band of blue.

Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch is one of my recently discovered newly favourite films.  It taught me something that I didn't know, the struggles that gay men had at that time and that it was illegal back then, also about the disgusting way that they were treated.  It makes me sad to think that my nan's only brother must have gone through something similar as a gay man at around the same time.  I never met him but it has made me want to learn more about him if I can, did he find love, did he endure any terrible treatment or was he lucky.

Anyway, I am so excited about this months fibre and I have all sorts of colour combinations going round in my head.  Could it be black with small amounts of blue, or yellows and oranges with blue or maybe it could be blue with flecks of black and sunny colours.  Whatever colourway it is I am sure that I won't be disappointed this time.

From the spoilers chat she has revealed that it isn't a smooth fibre, it will have texture in the way of Sari Silk and that colbalt blue would work great with this.  It could still be any of the colours I have going round in my head right now.  As for the fibre content, she has started putting it on the very, very bottom of the letters as she has had a few packaging issues lately whereby labels have been missed from the parcels.  I understand why she is doing this now but it kind of takes some of the fun and surprise out of it for me so I am not looking.

Its Panto time again!

It's that time of the year again when we take the family to Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre to see the annual Pantomime... oh not it's not, oh yes it is...

This year it is Peter Pan and unfortunately Jimmy Osmond, who was playing Captain Hook, suffered a stroke on 27th December and was rushed to hospital, where he received lots of care and was well looked after.  Darren Day, one of my favourite entertainers from my teenage years, stepped into the role and done a great job.  Lots of ad-libbing and poking fun at each other by the cast, a really fun and enjoyable night out.

12 Days of Christmas 2018 Part 2

Back in November I wrote a post about the 12 Days of Christmas "advent calendar" of fibre that I bought myself.  Well, obviously we are well into the New Year now and I have opened all of the little parcels inside.  I was a good girl and only opened one packet per day.  I didn't peep, even though it was really tempting to do that.

I have added the days and the names of the colours to the photos below but they might be quite small to read.  The Tussah Silk are in order from the top right going downwards and then turning left along the bottom, 20g each of Sunrise, Fir, Milk, Storm, Twilight, Wood, Cloud, Tuareg, Fog, Thyme, Paradise.

The spinning tips for the main braid is to spin it over the fold as the Yak fibres will be shorter than the others and that it likely to be comfortably spun somewhere between fingering and double knit weight.  Some people have blended the silk with the main braid and then spun and plied that, others have blended the silk with other fibre they have and used some or all of it to ply with the main braid, some have spun them all up separately and will use all 12 yarns in some kind of stripey or patterned item.  I like the idea of keeping them separate but I've never spun pure silk and it frightens me a bit but apparently that is also easier to spin if you spin it over the fold.  I've never spun over the fold but all that means is that instead of spinning it from the end of the braid in one continual length you pull pieces of and fold it over your finger and let the fibres go into the yarn from there.

I also took a photo of the free coaster that we got in the pack, which is really pretty.

I've bought some more Ingredients Boxes

I really do like the Ingredients Boxes from my main fibre supplier and they're not always available but she has them back in stock and in a few colourways so I've bought four of them, yes four!

As always each 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)

I've created these little collages and in the spare box in the bottom corner I have put an image containing a representation of my interpretation of the colours in the box.

First, we have Hydrangea, so delicate and pretty

Then we have Still Life, quite the opposite in its vibrancy, its certainly not still, its more like a fiesta

Next up we have Threads, which is kind of like half-way between the previous two in terms of colours and vivacity

And finally we have Pear, which is more colour coordinated and calm.

This lot should keep me busy for a while.

Today is a happy day

I'm sure that I have mentioned my neighbour from hell a couple of times before but we have been watching her over the past month or so taking things out of the house, one or two items at a time and trying not to get our hopes up too much that she might be moving out slowly and quietly.  She had a really loud party over Christmas that went on til the early hours, the first one she's had in quite a long time, but as annoying as it was we kept calm and hoped it was a moving out party.  It seems we might have been right as this past weekend things really ramped up and the larger furniture and items were taken out of the house on Saturday and Sunday and just like that she was gone. 

The Bailiffs turned up this morning to officially evict her and the locks were changed and notices posted on the window and front door but she had left all the lights on all day and all night over the weekend just to spite the landlord as he will be faced with the bill for that.  According to the landlord she left loads of rubbish and broken furniture in house along with a huge pile of unpaid bills, debt collector paperwork, court attendance and court order paperwork, so owes a lot of money to a lot of people along with several thousand in unpaid rent and its taken him this long to be able to evict her.

Coincidentally today is the 10th anniversary of my father's death, so what should have been quite a sad, reflective day has turned out to be a very happy and joyous day.  All we can hope for now is that she and her little brats don't return to cause trouble so fingers crossed for a fresh start and hope that once the landlord has restored the house to a liveable state that whoever moves in next is a decent human being, of course I won't settle until that happens and I get to know them but I have a glimmer of hope for the coming year.