Design A197 - Moss green cotton

I've been continuing to work on making motifs in a range of colours but I have quite a lot of cotton in this moss green/olive green colour and so I have decided that I will make a small shawl with it first and then I can use up any left overs on the multi-coloured shawls.

I've made a few of this design in the past, but not for a few years, with the last one I made being a custom make for a larger version of this.  This one has turned out a little on the small side even though I have used up almost all of the yarn.  I can't even add one more row as I don't have enough yarn to do that.  The left overs from this were just enough to make one single motif for the other shawls that I am working on.

Because of how small this is it is probably best worn like a bib with an open fronted style of coat. This one worn in the traditional way with the pattern down the back will fit either a very small woman or would be ideal for a child.  The only other thing it could be used for is a head covering perhaps? I remember my late mother wore headscarves in the 1970's when I was a small child.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 24

The final packet contains another pure white fibre and is called Not So Scrooge and is another fine soft fluffy one.  The fibre content is 25% each of Ultrafine Merino, Cashmere, Mulberry Silk and Rose Fibre.

 

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 23

Another Christmassy coloured fibre today, similar colours to the very first day but this one is different fibres and is called Candy Cane.  The fibre content is 50% Suri Alpaca, 25% Merino, 25% Mulberry Silk.  I might spin this one and Mistletoe & Wine together.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 22

I'm in love with today's fibre, its beautiful and called King Wenceslas and is a beautiful rich colour combination being made up of 75% Corriedale. 12.5% Red Eri Silk and 12.5 Tussah Silk.  Almost everyone in the chat group is going nuts over this one, we want more, we want more, we want more.😂

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 21

OMG it's another fawn coloured soft fluffy fibre and it's called Winter Knitter.  The fibre content is 50% Bluefaced Leicester, 25% Alpaca and 25% Muga Silk (geographically linked to Assam in India and previously reserved purely for use by Royalty).

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 20

This one reminds me of one of the fibres, Red Canary, I had from when I used to have the monthly subscription from another supplier that I have already spun.  It's called Selection Box and is a blend of 50% Shetland Wool, 25% Bamboo, 12.5% Sari Silk, 12.5% Flax and I think this one will be blended with other stuff to make a much bigger finished skein of yarn.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 19

OMG this is beautiful. Silver bells, silver bells, it's Christmas time in the city, ring-a-ling, hear them ring, soon it will be Christmas day, city sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style, in the air there's a feeling of Christmas, children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile, and on every street corner you hear, silver bells, silver bells... If you haven't guessed by now, this one is called Silver Bells and is a blend of 50% Superwash Merino, 25% Stellina, 25% Tweed wool.

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 18

Another white one today, soft and fluffy.  Its called All the Trimmings, and they're not joking, 50g and 8 different fibres but they've not given out the percentages on this one.  It's made up of Huacaya Alpaca, Bluefaced Leicester, Hill Radnor, Merino, Mint, Pineapple, Polwarth and Tencel.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 17

"Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie....", no that's not it "star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright..." no, that's not it either.  This one is called Star of Bethlehem and is 50% Polwarth, 25% Camel, 25% Soybean and is really soft and fluffy and I love it.

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 16

This one is the most Christmassy coloured one we've had for a while and is definitely heading for my "ingredients cupboard" because its 100% Bamboo and called Garland.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 15

Ooh, another white one.  This one is called Fa La La La Llama and it contains 25% each of Llama, Rambouillet (similar to Merino), Lotus Fibre and Rose Fibre.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 14

Wow, this one is proper proper pure brilliant white.  This one has given me a hard time trying to photograph it and its a fibre that will most likely go into my "ingredients cupboard".  It is called Faux, Faux, Faux and is 50% Faux Cashmere (made from nylon), 50% Bio-nylon so you could technically say that this is 100% nylon.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 13

When I opened the packet I thought I was having deja-vu, its's very similar to Day 10 in terms of the colour.  This is Walking in the Air and it's 80% Superfine Merino, 20% Tussah Silk.  I may spin Day 10 and Day 13 together into one yarn.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 12

Oh, this one has made me a little sad because obviously the name of it was decided sometime ago so that the scratch cards could be printed and the boxes made up and we have since lost our great treasure Queen Elizabeth II.  This one is called Queen's Speech and what a luxury this one is at 40% Superfine Merino, 40% Mulberry Silk and 20% Cashmere.

I thought about buying more of this one but decided that I was too scared of it, it's so fine I might turn it to felt if I breathe on it.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 11

Hmmm, unusual and pretty in it's own right.  Say hello to Santa's Socks, a blend of 80% Superwash Bluefaced Leicester and 20% Tweed Wool.  Reminds me a little of one of the sock yarns I have used to make a shawl with, the shawl is still available to buy from my shop as I write this post.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 10

I opened the packet a little and peeped inside and was very happy with what I found. It's blue and white and super soft and fluffy.  This is Winter Lake, 60% Bamboo, 40% Merino.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 9

Ha ha ha ha ha OMG I can't believe what they've called this one, hilarious!  Let me introduce you to Reindeer Poop, a blend of 80% Zwartbles and 20% Stellina.  Well, of course Reindeer Poop would be slightly sparkly from eating the sparkly magical hay that Dudley Moore, aka Pip, fed them in Santa Claus the Movie.

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 8

Urgh, this one is pretty ugly.  This one is definitely getting either blended or over-dyed.  It's called Baubles and is, urm, what colours are in this exactly?  I do have other fibre that is a blend of green and purple and that's not so bad, I think its the shades and tones of the green and purple that doesn't work for me in this one. It's 100% Merino anyway so that's OK.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 7

This one is sooooo soft and its white and its called Snowballs!  Made of 50% Tweed wool, 25% Kid Mohair and 25% Baby Alpaca.  I have no immediate plans for this, will have to see what else we're gonna get in the box and see what will work together.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 6

Oh, nice!  I immediately thought this was going to be called Lump of Coal or something like that but it's called Naughty List, but then if you're on the naughty list you're getting a lump of coal in your stocking!  50% Merino, 25% Flax and 25% Llama.  I love this one and its so unusual to see a proper proper black fibre blend.

After Christmas, in the New Year, WoW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Design A447 - Pinks, purples and white

I'm carrying on with my mission to use up as much of the Aran weight cotton yarn as I possibly can and this is the best time of year to do it because it's cooler weather and heading into even cooler weather.

I've picked another vintage pattern, this time it was published in the USA in 1976.  The photos in the book are not the best but it does look like it could be visually stunning.  I started to follow the instructions but I was finding it awkward to get "inch length loops" or for what I was able to do to look equal and neat and I didn't like the massive "hole" in the middle of what would be a flower.  I decided to start with a magic loop for a smaller "hole" and instead of having a number of long loops of yarn which formed the petals of the flowers I changed these to clusters of double crochet (US)/triple crochet (UK), which meant working 5 of those stitches up to, but not completing the last pull through, and keeping them on the hook until all 5 were done and then just pull through all 5 loops on the hook to make the cluster.

To get them all to be equal in size, I popped the non-working end of the crochet hook into the hole and pulled up against that and secured the ends.  I guess a biro pen or something similar would also do that job.

I had no solid colour plan when I first started, but I knew that I would not be following the colour plan of the pattern, which is rows of colours that form the V's of the triangular shape.  I did know that the main colours would be white, ecru or black as I have large amounts in each of those colours, and just to make as many flowers as possible from each colour that I have left in my stash and see how things go based on how many flowers I get from the left overs.

Because I am using different yarn to the original pattern and the fact that I have altered how the pattern is worked my motifs are coming out a tad smaller than the measurements on the pattern so having done some figuring out I need to work enough motifs to have 15 of them across the shoulders, not the original 13, and this then works to the original measurements of 60 inches across the shoulders.  It does, however, mean that I need to make 64 motifs as opposed to 49.

I've decided that the first one will be a random mix of pinks and purples with the main colour being white and so I focused on working just those colours for a while.

In terms of how many motifs of each colour I was able to make from the leftovers and how many I made from the slightly larger amounts are as follows, in order from top left to the bottom right: 

white = main colour, light purple = 4 motifs, powder pink = 1 motif, medium pink = 3 motifs 

light old pink = 3 motifs, heather = 8 motifs, dark purple = 9 motifs, medium purple = 2 motifs 

red wine = 1 motif, candyfloss pink = 11 motifs, cherry = 11 motifs, rose = 11 motifs

Two of the pinks and the two reds are very similar in colour but are slightly different.  I laid the motifs out in the shape of the pattern in a random order and then spent a long time playing about moving them around so that not only were two of the same colour not next to each other but also so that the colours were as evenly spread out as I could get them because at point I had all the dark purples loitering together on the left and the reds were all huddled up together too and that just won't do so I made sure they were as mixed as I could get them.

At the point in the photo above, where the motifs have one row of he main colour around them and are joined together I only had 38g left to do the small motifs that fit in the spaces and the fringing. This was not enough so I had to order more of the white yarn because although I started with 200g my yarn has slightly fewer metres per 50g than the original pattern yarn plus the fact that I have made a mine bigger. 

When the yarn arrived and I started to make the little motifs I wasn't happy, they looked messy so once again I had to figure out a better way to work them so that they are neater and more even whilst keeping the original style of the pattern. 

I also increased the fringing lengths from 10inch to 15inch, looped through, pulled each one tight and trimmed the lengths straight. 

I think the finished shawl is very visually stunning and I will be making many more of these in an array of colours.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 5

This one is called Carrots, Milk & Mince Pies.  Ok, different, I don't see the mince pies though, where's the beige or brown bits?  It's 50% Superfine Merino, 25% Mulberry Silk and 25% Milk Fibre.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 4

I don't think I'd call this a luxury fibre but here in the UK it is definitely a different blend to what is normally available and is probably more likely to be available to spinners in Scandinavian countries from suppliers in their own countries.  Will make for an interesting spin.  It is called Lapland and is a blend of Finnish Landrace, Icelandic, Norwegian and Scandinavian Mountain in equal amounts (25% of each).  I don't mind humbug kind of blends.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 3

Ok, this one is different.  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one.  It's pretty enough and is Christmas coloured but how will those colours look once its spun up, will have to be careful not to muddy the colours.  It's 100% Shetland Wool and is called Wreath.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 2

OMG this is gorrrrrgeous!  This one is called Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh and it's 62.5% Merino, 25% Stellina and 12.5% Red Eri Silk (Peace Silk).  I would sit and stroke this one but better not, it might turn to felt if I did that too much.

After Christmas, in the New Year, WOW made additional 100g braids of fibre of all of the Advent Calendar Fibres available to purchase to those who had purchased the Advent Calendar.  There were limited stocks of each one available, it was on a first-come-first-served basis and there was a short time frame of priority before the remaining stock was made available to general purchase.  This was one of 7 fibres that I bought an extra 100g of.

Advent Calendar 2022 Day 1

Oooh the first fibre is pretty, reminds me a little bit of striped toothpaste.  It's called Mistletoe & Wine and is 80% Falkland Merino (white), 10% Bamboo (green) and 10% Sari Silk (red).

Opening the fibre Advent Calendar

Time to open the black box and see what's inside.  This is the same type of box I used for my goodies when I send them to customers but in a different size and colour but I can't afford to have them embossed with my company name as that more than doubles the price of each box.  One day, maybe, a girl can dream...

Right then, inside the box are lots of little black paper bags all sealed with staples and all have numbers on them written in gold pen, or do they...  there is one that doesn't have a number on it and I have all the other packets in numerical order now and I didn't pay extra for a day 25 gift so this must be a free gift.  There is also a large scratch card and a trolley token on a key ring with the WOW logo on it, which must be for scratching off the card each day and then you can use it to get a trolley when you go shopping.

It's firm, it's scented with something like citrus or limonene and I think it's some kind of soap or something inside the fluff.  I have no idea what it is exactly or what it is used for, felting maybe, I don't know as I don't do felting.

This was the only free gift this year.  Last year's was a little OTT with the bells, the plastic sheep, the bauble making kit and the free 50g of fibre.  Actually, I think I'd like the 50g of free fibre more than this soap thing or whatever it is.  

Several hours pass...

Ha, found out what it is.  Apparently it is a felted soap and you use it to wash yourself using the fluff around the soap like a flannel and you can either just wash your hands/face or you can use it in the shower.  Hmmm, I have really sensitive skin so its going nowhere near my face but I have tried washing my hands with it and I'm not impressed.  Oh well, it was a free gift, just not my thing.

I've combed the Olive Green Jacob fleece

Back in September I dyed 427g of Jacob fleece a kind of Olive Green using Greener Shades dye at 1%, made up of 45% River Blue, 45% Sunshine Yellow and 10% Ruby Red.  I have now combed that fleece and am left with 246g of fluff to do with what I want, most likely used in a blend.

As you can see from the photo showing a sample of the nests I got from it, it has created hand combed nests in a variety of shades but once its spun up or used in a blend and spun up it will all work well together to make something pretty and interesting.

Look what's arrived!

It's here, it's here, it's here.  Happy Christmas to me.  Just a couple of weeks and I can start opening the packets.

Design LF433 - Pretty in Red (or the Ladybird shawl)

I started making this back in January and then I must have put it to one side after completing the flowers for some reason before picking it up again last week and joining them all together with the main colour. 

I have used Twilley's Goldfingering in shades WG4/004 light gold, WG31/031 black and a couple of different dye lots of WG38/038 red.

I didn't make any notes nor did I seem to take any work-in-progress photos other than a couple where I am preparing to add the fringing.  My eldest daughter said that I had made the sofa look like a Christmas candy cane.  I did run out of space and so I used the back of a couple of cushions on the floor.  The reason I laid them out like this was because whilst I was able to use one dye lot for the shawl I had to use a couple of different dye lots of red when I got to the fringing part and so I cut the lengths and divided them across the number of tassels and then the other dye lots were cut and added in equal amounts to each tassel.  This means that all of the tassels are made from mixed dye lots but it won't be obvious because they all contain mixed dye lots.

I think the final shawl looks a bit like a ladybird.

Design A444 - In Green Cotton

I am still ploughing on with using up the aran weight cotton yarn, I'm getting there but not there yet.  I have some very bright yellow that I have used as flower centres but it's not really the colour that I hoped for when I ordered "lemon".  I was expecting a nice pale yellow and I got this "lemon rind yellow" colour.  That'll teach me for shopping and ordering when I am tired, I obviously wasn't paying full attention. 

So, now that I just have a whole load of bright yellow doing nothing I decided to over-dye it to make it more usuable and a more appealing colour cos it's going to take someone really special to pull that bright yellow off.  Pass the sunglasses.  I bought some dye for cotton, Dylon handwash dye in shade "Ocean Blue".  I wound the balls of cotton onto my niddy-noddy and tied each one off loosely so I had 7 and a half skeins.  You have to make the ties loose when you dye otherwise you can get a tie-dye effect, I don't want this at this time. This dye is a "cold water" dye, you don't actually use cold water per se, it is warm but only hand-warm, not really hot to boiling like my other dyes that I use.  I made it up in my dye pot as per the instructions and lowered the skeins of yarn in and followed the instructions for timings etc.

All dyes that I have used, no matter what kind, react with the base colour of the yarn or fabric that you are dyeing so you have to take that into account and so "standard colour mixing rules" apply i.e yellow + blue = green, yellow + red = orange, blue + red = purple, blue + red + green = brown, you get the idea.  So I know that blue dye on a yellow yarn is going to make green, but what shade of green.  I am hoping, based on the shade of blue dye I've picked, that it might come out leaning toward the olive green tones but I am not familiar with Dylon dyes so I don't really know what their shades are like.

So, its not come out Olive green but its decent but if you look closely its not totally even, a few flecks of yellowy-greeny bits still exist, not bright yellow but not fully green either.  Not what I'd hoped for but it does add interest that I can live with.

Once dry I decided to make the same design shawl I made earlier in the year.  Due to the fact that this one is cotton and smooth and more dense it looks different to the white fluffy acrylic version, its not as cuddly, but that's different fibres for you, they all have their own look and different properties

I've ordered myself something for Christmas - again!

I enjoyed last years Fibre Advent Calendar, I've not spun much of it yet, but I will get to it soon enough.  They've changed it a bit for this year.  There will be only 50g of fibre each day but it will be more luxurious than last years and it will be lower priced too.  I was happy with last years price and the fact that you had 100g a day which meant that you could make something decent with each fibre braid.  I don't really mind it being a smaller amount, I've still ordered one.

Again, its a limited edition of 250 so once its gone, its gone and it won't be dispatched until around about 18th November.

I can't wait to receive this now, sounds intriguing what they've been chatting about on the groups etc and instead of individual slips in the packages we are having a scratch card this year with the details on it.

Multi-coloured and Ecru blanket/throw

I quite enjoyed making the pink/purple/red blanket throw so I am going to make another using an array of colours, still sticking with 12 though, and I am going to take it a little bigger and start with 6 centres of each colour, giving me 72 motifs in total for a 6 x 12 formation.

Again, I made a list and worked it out so that two similar colours were not next to each other and that no two motifs were the same, some are similar but not exactly the same.

As last time, I had all the motifs in piles of 6 based on the centre colour.  I knew that this time I was just making it longer and it would be a 6 x 12 formation, which then means that the piles of motifs need to be in two rows of 6 to begin with.  I then arranged them by centre colour, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark and then second row dark, light, dark, light, dark, light and then made sure the colour type were well spread as best I could as I didn't really have 6 light and 6 dark, more like 5 and 7.  

Leaving the bottom motif where it was I then took each pile from the first row and placed it in the third row but dropping it down by one motif and I done this for each pile in turn, row by row until all 72 motifs were out.  Then I had the task of making sure that no two motifs next to each other had the same colour last row and if I did I find that then I always swapped with another with the same centre colour and I kept going until I was happy with that and then done a check on the middle round and took whatever swaps steps were necessary there. The final step was just to make sure that there weren't large patches of red or purple or whatever in one place and that as best as possible that all colours were are evenly spread out as feasibly possible.  Once happy I used some of the safety pins and I connected each motif in place using one of the chain spaces to make sure they didn't get mixed up.

I tried again to figure out the instructions but they are still not working for me as they are written so I know what the pattern is intended to be and how many repeats are needed its just that the written instructions don't add up and I can't even figure out which bit is wrong due to constant noise from one person or another, and not necessarily in this house, neighbours seem to be constantly mowing grass, drilling into walls, hammering and banging and I can even hear one person's washing machine through the thick concrete wall and it making more noise than the one that's actually inside my own home! Its infuriating!

I didn't take as many work-in-progress photos this time, for some reason, so I don't really have anything to show now other than the photos of it pinned out to dry.  Oh, yes, I added the same edging as last time which was...  "Three rounds, starting with a base round, then a round of V stitches and finally the shell with picot edging, with a special version for the corners".

The photos above show it finished but before blocking and the lower one shows it pinned out blocking to shape.  I haven't gotten any decent photos of it yet, I need to figure out how I want to show it off but I will get them when I can.

Dyeing the Whitefaced Dartmoor for a second time

 A couple of weeks ago I tried to dye some combed Whitefaced Dartmoor wool using some left over cold water dye.  It didn't work.  At best it turned some of the outer-fibres of the hand combed nests a very very pale silver grey but it hadn't gotten down into the inner fibres. Today is the day that I am going to give this fibre some colour.

I am using my usual Greener Shades Dyes and have chosen to dye this at 0.5% dye depth (half a gram of dye per 100g of dry fibre), there is 282g of fibre and the dye is made up of 75% River Blue, 25% Amethyst Purple.

I did loosen the hand combed nests a bit before putting them in the dye pot in the hopes that the dye would reach all of the fibres and I am happy with the results.  The plan is to use this fibre in my own blend and add some other fibres and colours to it to make it more interesting and to add a bit of softness as well.

An interesting patchwork of blue and pink-y purple that I am sure will eventually make an interesting spun yarn and then go on to be made into something that someone would love to buy from me.