Another Design A2 - Colinette Fire

Carrying on with my Design A2 roll, I have picked a single skein of Colinette Mohair in shade Fire and this yarn has been discontinued some time.  Its 78% Mohair, 13% Wool, 9% Nylon.  Again, I used all of the skein.  I made this so fast that I didn't take any progress photos, nor did I take any when I washed and blocked it.

These product photos were taken several months after I made the item.

Oh so pretty - in the garden

I am really starting to enjoy my home and garden again, I'm slowly falling back in love with it after 9 years of the living hell of a horrid neighbour and her kids.  It's peaceful once again, which is what we loved about it when we bought the house 12 years ago.  Obviously there has been a bit of noise from the landlord having to put his house back together but the good news is that his own daughter has recently moved in as she needs somewhere to live and he's had enough of terrible tenants and I can't blame him for that.  I've not met her yet but she's quiet and you rarely hear her two kids.

Anyway, we have flowers in the front garden, all those bulbs that I planted last September are flowering.  I have seen a few bulbs on the surface, half-eaten, bloody squirrels!!!

First of all, the two trees outside of our house are in full bloom and they are beautiful.  We used to have three trees but a couple of years ago a large truck tried to drive along the walk and in trying to negotiate around the trees the steep embankment just behind them they got themselves stuck and ended up backing into the tree, cracked the trunk from the base all the way up making it unsafe and it had to be cut down.

This is my view from the upstairs window in front of which I sit and knit or crochet. There is a large tree behind it in the distance.

In our own front garden we have various flowering bulbs and a magnolia tree that are in bloom.

I particularly like this batch of photos that I took with my Canon camera, yes, amazingly I took these, they're not stock photos from the internet, they're just so much more focused and detailed than those taken with my mobile phone.  There are a couple in the batch above that I took with my camera too but most were taken with my phone.

Bluefaced Leicester - Design A2

I've decided to use up some of my widow skeins on some more A2 Designs.  This one is 100% Bluefaced Leicester aran weight yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners and was spun at their Yorkshire Mill.  Its really lovely and soft.

I just kept knitting until I ran out of yarn.

It was a fair few months before I got around to photographing it.

March's Fibre is here! - Munstead Wood

Hmmm, I've been unsure what to expect with this one since it was announced in the letter that it was based on a David Austin rose.  Yes, I googled the rose and found it to be a dark pinky burgundy colour and hoped it would be more burgundy than pink.  Its 62.5% Merino, 25% Linen, 12.5% Bamboo

I'm actually quite happy as its a dark tonal pink and not the horror that came a few months ago.

A little bit of A2

Design A2 is a good design for using up single skeins of aran weight yarn or left-overs from a larger project.  It is a versatile design that is really adjustable once you have the main part of the shawl worked, after that it is dependent on what yarn you left as to how big it can become.

I have a few single skeins of varying length of aran weight yarn that I can't really do anything else with.  Maybe I could look to see if I could work it with something else and make something with stripes but these are completely different texture and colour to anything else that I have, in most cases, and so a versatile pattern like this is a lifesaver.

I have a single skein of Rowan Summer Tweed in shade Sprig.  Its not a huge skein and is quite textured.  Its 70% Silk, 30% Cotton and I have 120m of it.

Ok, I was just one row short of the main part of the pattern but it has made a cute little scarf, ideal if you don't like much bulk.

March's Fibre Club Letter

March's fibre club letter has arrived in my e-mail. 

The letter reads:

On the 29th of March 1869, the British Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was born.  He designed a huge number of private houses, and was a driving force in the rise of the Arts and Crafts style.  His work however was versatile, and he also designed a very large number of public buildings.  Much of central modern Dehli owes a great deal to the design skills of Lutyens.  This green space set out at the heart of the city means it is one of the only major global cities where the centre is cooler in temperature than the edges of the city.

Green space plays a key part in the design of Lutyens buildings.  One of his early commissions was for a house at Munstead Wood for the garden designer and horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll.  Jekyll was renowned for creating stunning hardy perennial flower borders, the sort that are now often seen at National Trust properties.  She is known for her bold use of colours, and wrote several books on the use of colour in gardens.  Lutyens and Jekyll went on to work together in many more commissions, whilst he designed the house, she created the gardens that allowed the house to sit in its landscape.

The garden at Munstead Wood also lead to one of the most significant of Lutyens commissions.  By the end of the First World War he'd been appointed as an architect by the Commonwealth War Graves commission to design monuments to commemorate the war dead.  Many larger war cemeteries have a stone of remembrance designed by him, and the Cenotaph in London is also his work.  In 1919, The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George asked Lutyens to design a catafalque (raised bier) as a temporary structure to act as a memorial in central London.  Lutyens suggested an alternative name, Cenotaph, meaning empty tomb.  He has first come across the term in the gardens of Munstead Wood where it was used to refer to a larger block of elm set on stone which served as a garden seat.

Words really can't do justice to the scale of the work he completed in his lifetime, so I hope you'll find time to explore the further reading links and discover more about this pair of inspiring creative people.

Your fibre this months takes its colour inspiration from a beautiful rose called Munstead Wood.  Developed by the magicians at David Austin Roses we loved this rose so much we accidentally bought it twice!  If you are ever in Shropshire a visit to their show gardens in June and July is thoroughly recommended, a little piece of paradise on earth.

I'm certainly intrigued by this one as I love David Austin roses but at the same time I am a little apprehensive as roses come in a range of colours, including pink, so I am hoping that if we have pink again that its a very delicate shade of pink like the David Austin rose in my garden called Spirit of Freedom.

From the spoilers chat she has revealed that it is a blend with linen and bamboo so this yarn will drape and have very little memory and best for lace and not for ribbing and will work best when spun finely.

I've bought more spinning fibre

What am I like, I've only gone and bought more spinning fibre to go with the vast amount I already have.  To be fair I've had gift vouchers for my favourite fibre seller and money for my birthday so I went and ordered some lovely stuff that she's just put in the shop.

The first braid is this 50% Romney Wool, 25% Silk, 25% Linen.  The description is that it gives and unusual texture but beautiful stitch definition. Romney is a long stapled British wool of 28-29  microns and by blending it with silk it softens the blend and increases shine and it can worn around the neck.  I love the colour, a pale blue-green colour.

The second braid is this 28% BFL, 28% Manx Loaghtan, 28% Sari Silk, 10% Merino, 6% Stellina.  The description is that this is a gorgeous fluffy textured blend that is not super soft but will have lovely bounce form the Manx Loaghtan, and ancient breed from the Isle of Man with a micron count of 29-31 with fantastic crimp. This won't spin smoothly so embrace the joy of sari silk and add some bling.  I was totally attracted to it by the colour, sparkle and texture.

Another new design - D35

This design is supposed to be worked using double knit yarn but I have chosen to use some worsted weight yarn, which is a little heavier, so I have used a slightly larger hook.  I could have used a slightly bigger one still, which would have made a slightly bigger shawl, but its not made a stiff fabric.

The yarn has been discontinued for some time, its 56% Cotton, 44% Nylon and produces an unusual effect.

A new design - L515

I'm trying a new design for a narrow scarf like shawl using some of my own handspun Shetland Wool yarn.  I love the design, although it is quite complex and time consuming and I am disappointed that I didn't get to finish the pattern as it was written because the required meterage of yarn had been converted wrongly so I had to make a decision on what to do based on roughly how much yarn I had left.  I had about 20m of yarn left to complete 18 rows of beaded lace plus the beaded cast off.  Well, that just isn't going to happen is it!  The pattern said it required 250m, the yarn I had had 360m in it and the correct actual meterage required is 465m.

Okey dokey then, straight into a beaded picot cast off to give it a pretty top edge.  I used Toho beads size 8 in shade 177: Trans Rainbow Smokey Topaz and it took a total of 436 beads.

Spinning up Khaki

My next spinning project is following on from the last, taking the monthly club fibres in turn.  This is from November 2018 and is called Khaki.  Split into two length ways and spun from then end worsted style to make a traditional 2ply yarn.  This is a nice yarn.  I didn't take any work-in-progress photos.

The fibre content is 50% Shetland Wool, 50% Merino Wool, making it soft and squishy but a bit more hardwearing than pure Merino.  100g/378m of sport weight yarn.