Baubles - September 2016

Carrying on from my post in August about making Christmas Baubles, these are what I made in September.  There are quite a lot!

80mm cerise glitter baubles with vintage pink Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold, silver and dark gold smooth baubles with vintage Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold glitter baubles with vintage bronze Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold glitter baubles with vintage green Twilley's Goldfingering

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80mm gold  smooth and glitter baubles with vintage royal blue Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm glitter, shiny and matt gold baubles with vintage black/multi Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold shiny baubles with vintage burgundy Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm silver matt baubles with vintage bright red Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm black glitter baubles with vintage bright red Twilley's Goldfingering

Brave the Shave 2016

No, I'm not shaving my hair for charity but my husband is.  We have had a number of friends and family that have battled Cancer, some of them have pulled through, some of them have pulled through more than once and sadly, some of them have not made it.

Garry decided some months ago that he was going to take part in Macmillan's Brave the Shave Fundraising Campaign and contacted the landlady of a local pub, The Railway Inn in Whitacre Heath, to ask if he could hold the event there.  The landlady, Maxine, not only agreed but she also decided that she would shave her hair and help out with the fundraising.

Money came pouring in from regulars at the pub and so did donations of prizes for a raffle that would be drawn on the night of the shave event, which was set for  17th September.  They even had an article in a local newspaper, which created even more of a buzz about the event and on the night the pub was packed to the rafters and a local man, know as Bear, also shaved his hair off.

I managed to get a video of my husbands shave, it is quite noisy with people shouting and talking but its good, no swear words or anything, or at least I didn't hear any.

In total Garry raised £401.95, I'm not sure how much Maxine and Bear raised but that is a nice boost to Macmillan's Fundraising.

Baubles - August 2016

A couple of years ago, when I was running my old business when I used to make tea cosies, hats, scarves, gloves etc I came up with the idea of crocheting designs over the top of plain baubles.  I started purchasing baubles when they were on discount immediately after Christmas and looking for the right threads to use with them.  I knew what I wanted to use and so started buying what I could find on Ebay and car boot sales etc.  This is how I have so much Twilley's Goldfingering in so many different colours.  I never did get round to actually making the baubles and so I decided that as the designs were going to be lace that they would actually fit in with my shop as a Christmas range.

I'm just going to put the photos of the finished items in the order that I made them as I didn't take any work-in-progress photos.  Smooth baubles can be slippery to work with, especially when you are trying to crochet closed the design around them as with most of the designs require the cover to be put onto the bauble at a certain point so that the design then closes in around the bauble as you work so it can no longer get in or out without undoing the design.  Glitter covered baubles are a nightmare in that the design can get hooked up on the glitter, making it difficult to pull it on over the bauble and you also get covered in glitter in doing so.  The upside of Glitter covered baubles is that the crochet generally clings to the bauble so as you work the bauble is not constantly trying to escape.

These are what I made in August 2016, with a few that I made earlier in the year when I was working out patterns and sizing.

60mm silver glitter baubles with vintage Twilley's Goldfingering

70mm silver glitter baubles with vintage Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm black glitter baubles with vintage turquoise Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm green smooth and textured baubles with vintage green Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm brown glitter, smooth and textured baubles with vintage brown Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm blue smooth and textured baubles with vintage blue Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold, cerise and black glitter baubles with matching vintage Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm gold, cerise and black glitter baubles with vintage Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm soft pink baubles with vintage burgundy Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm lime green smooth and textured baubles with vintage black/bronze Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm silver matt baubles with vintage bold coloured Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm black glitter baubles with vintage pastel coloured Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm smooth duck egg baubles with white Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm textured duck egg baubles with white Twilley's Goldfingering

80mm cerise glitter baubles with vintage gold Twilley's Goldfingering

Getting chickens and harvesting the vegetables

We are back from our camping holiday just outside of Wells, Gloucestershire and have been and got some chickens.  We have been advised that our house should be able to accommodate 4 chickens so we have chosen 4 different breeds.  Ranger the ginger one, Bluebell the grey one, Sussex the white one and Rocky Road the black one.  We have called them Ginger, Annie, Star and Roxsy.

The place we had them from has a return policy whereby if you have any problems with any or all of the chickens you can take them back within a given period of time.  We had issues with Rocksy, the black Rocky Road chicken where she was squawking loud all of the time and physically attacking the other hens to the point of there being blood everywhere.  We took her back and she was put in a special "ASBO" enclosure that they have for problem chickens, where they can keep an eye on their behaviour.  Our hen house became peaceful with the other hens getting along together really well with Ginger, the smallest of them, being in charge.

As you can see, our raised vegetable bed is green, with the runner beans being good producers.  The variety are "Gigantica" I think they were called, my father-in-law got them for us and they are big runner beans.  Quite a lot of them have grown in funny shapes due to lack of growing room and with me being only small I have to keep getting step ladders out to reach the tops of the bean plants and find all these beans that have been "trapped" and grown weird.

Whilst their plants have produced beans for them ours have gone mad and I've been harvesting them twice a week, cooking half of them and blanching/freezing the other half.  We have over 11lb of sliced green beans in our freezer so you imagine what kind of crop we have had this year, so many in fact that when I close my eyes at night that is all I see, they've even been calling to me and they must know my name as they have grown in shapes of the letters, J U L I.  They obviously come unstuck when it came to the last letter though but I suppose growing in the shape of an "a" is a tall order.  Amazing!

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the cabbage and cauliflower.  We have not had anything from them as we have been blighted with millions, and I mean millions, of caterpillars.  I got excited and took a photo of a purple cauliflower as it started to grow but it didn't get much bigger than that before it was covered in caterpillars.

We did plant some potatoes in bags and we did get a few from those but not very many.  Tomatoes, we had a few but mostly the insects got to them before we did.  We did get a few beetroot and carrots though.  Its the first time either of us have grown vegetables and its a big learning curve but at least the chickens are laying eggs so we have a ready supply of fresh eggs to enjoy.

Lincoln Longwool - Softly Solid Jade

I brought this from The Fibre Fairy back in October 2012.  I bought 4 different large braids from her and this is only the second lot that I have spun up so far.  My other one to date was the green Polwarth wool.  The Fibre Fairy appears to have closed down the business, which is probably why I got so many bargains.

Being so happy with the result of my spinning and dying of the Lincoln Longwool lamb's fleece I decided to try this Lincoln Longwool in shade "softly solid jade".  There is 345g of fibre here, that is a big braid of combed fibre.

I started spinning this way back on 9th June and I separated it out into 3 fairly even amounts and then each of those amounts into two as I spun up each little bag, and its taken until 9th August to finish spinning it all.  It was quite compacted and hard work to spin, made a lot easier by pulling it apart as best as I could to loosen all the fibres out.  I made 3 skeins of 2-ply yarn.  Its not as nice as the Lincoln Longwool that I dyed and spun myself from raw fleece and doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of lustre, which it should have if enough care had been taken during the dying process, which judging by the lack of lustre and how it has compacted I would guess has not happened in this case.

All three skeins have come out as sport weight yarn and are 107g/269m, 111g/263m and 107g/258m and will be used together to make one large shawl.

Chunky Lace Capelet - Design SB168

With the wedding season upon us, and in hopes of increasing sales, I decided to return to a really quick knit that is really pretty as well, that is in a much lower price range than many of intricate shawls.  I bought in some yarn in the right thickness and quantities and got knitting.  They are all the same design, in the same size, and I made them one after the other so will just put them all in the same blog post.  They are all made from Twilley's Freedom Super Bulky 100% wool, which is a single ply yarn, except for the green one which is made from Rowan Amy Butler Sweet Harmony which is 100% merino wool, which is a chainette ply yarn and is a discontinued yarn.

Beginning on 26th April 2016, the first one I made was in Pearl, an off-white and I made a few in this colour.  I didn't take any work-in-progress photos other than the Pearl shawl and the Blossom shawl.

I started off by making these in pearl and they have a natural light coloured wooden toggle button fastening.

 On 10th May I started knitting a black version, which has black wooden toggle button fastening. 

I began making 2 green ones on 28th April, these are the ones made with Rowan Sweet Harmony and they have a green wooden toggle button fastening.

I also made two in shade Bluebell on 12th May, which was a discontinued colour when I bought it.  I mixed up some of my eldest daughters artists acrylic paint and painted the wooden toggles to match the shawl.

 Onto garnet next and I made this on 13th May, painting the toggle button to match., 

. Fuchsia pink next, on 16th May, again with painted toggle button fastening.

I had a little break whilst I done other things and then came back and made some more.  All the blues are muted tones, so on 18th July I made one in Misty Morning and one in Moonlight, again painting the buttons to match. 

On 19th July I made one of these shawl in Blossom, a baby pink and painted the buttons to match.

Next up was one in a very dark pink called Vintage Rose and one in Ice Blue, both on 20th July, again with painted buttons to match.

The final one of these that I had the supplies to make was in Amethyst and I made it on 21st July 2016, again painting the buttons to match.

The photo below shows some of the buttons on plastic chopsticks, the perfect thing for popping the buttons on and holding whilst you paint them so you get a nice smooth finish, having being painted they are then stud in clean empty jars to dry.  The once dry the colour was checked again against the knitted item.  They were usually given at least two coats of paint and then finished off with a clear varnish to seal the paint so that it can't rub or wash off.  The coat of varnish has made the buttons a little bit darker but they still match with the shawl.

Clusters of Bronze - Design LF427

Hot on the heels of the last Twilley's Goldfingering 1970s fringed shawl comes another one in a different design, also designed by Twilley's back in the day.  I managed to get my hands on 24 reels of vintage Goldfingering in a bronze colour and decided to make one of the other designs in the pattern book that requires a larger number of reels of one colour than the tri-coloured motif shawl.

This design is also made up using motifs that are also joined as you go.  Instructions were not full and clear on how to work the corner joins and this took several attempts to figure out the best way to do them for the nicest result and its quite pretty already.  Starting on 20th June, I was finished by 14th July 2016.

Before and after pictures of blocking.

This shawl is huge, on me at least as I am only 5'4", but is stunningly beautiful.