Needles on the Move

As I suspected, once I finally got going it didn’t take me long to weave this project. I crossed the finish line well within the deadline and the runner (skier) is proudly holding up my spindle collection on the bookshelf.

I’m not entirely happy with the sett, the weaving seems a little loose to me. It may tighten up a little with a wash, but I haven’t washed it and somehow, now it’s in place, I suspect laziness will kick in!

I have a bit of yarn left over, I started with 100m of each colour and guess I used about half the green and most of the white. The runner measures 23″ including fringe and there wasn’t too much loom waste thankfully. One good thing about the Rigid Heddle is that you can pretty much weave right up to the end of the warp, I think I lost about 4 inches of yarn.

This was a practice run for a bigger project I’m planning later in the year, and I’m pretty confident now that I can manage that one without messing it up. I just have to get spinning for it!

This year, I joined Team Suck Less for the Ravelympics, hoping to suck less at something over the course of the Winter Games in Vancouver.

I decided that my most needy area was in cotton - not the spinning of it, I have lots of little skeins, but actually using it up! So I pledged to actually weave something out of my Charkha spun cotton.

The tricky part of this is not the weaving, the project will be small, plain weave and will probably take a couple of hours. The challenge, which I haven’t yet overcome (loom is empty), is to actually start - you see I need to chop handspun cotton up into little bits to make a warp, and that is a bit tricky. This cotton represents a fair bit of sweat and tears and is very precious!

While I psych myself up, I have been spinning more on the charkha, just to get myself in the mood, and have finished a few more skeins. This is kind of a practice run for a bigger project I’m planning for the summer, so it won’t hurt to have a bit more yardage lying around.

So, wish me luck! And let me know if you’re challenging yourself for this Ravelympics.

Woke up, coughed uncontrollably. Fell asleep.

Woke up again, coughed uncontrollably, suggested Neil might work from home in case I needed a dash to A&E to make my lungs go again. Fell asleep.

Woke up, had bleary-eyed breakfast, attempted to knit, failed, coughed.

Decided that no knitting/writing/spinning/thinking/talking could occur while I only have half a lung, so I made this:

It really was brainless, after a little bit of maths to begin with (which I messed up - you can see in the first picture that the warp is off-centre). I happily wove all afternoon, without the added brain-distraction of TV or music. The breeze came in and the pollen stayed out (thankfully!)

The yarn is handspun merino/silk blend which I spun at Mum’s last Easter with weaving in mind (it’s the yarn in the new blog header btw). The pattern is based on the one in the Schacht Newsletter, Winter 2008. It’s floaty and blue and gorgeous and took five hours from start to finish. Weaving is the new black.

My selveges are rubbish, it’s measuring 7 1/4 inches instead of eight, I’m not quite getting a balanced weave… but - I LOVE it :-D

I have warped up for four waschloths (assuming I figured out the maths correctly) and I can imagine myself using them forever in spite of all the imperfections just because they will be my first ever weaving and therefore very, very special.

I’ve never understood the reasoning of people who say they need to use cheap yarn to learn on and save the ‘proper’ special yarn for when they are good at something. I don’t have my first knitting or my first spinning, I really wish I did as I know I would treasure it. The first anything is so exciting that surely you want to keep it, use it, look at it every day until it wears out. You’re not going to do that if you choose cheap manky acrylic to learn on.

Just my two cents :-D

Wonderwool was great fun as usual, and rendered more so by the crowd we managed to track down there. Seems every knitter and her dog were hanging out in Builth on Saturday! I went with Alice and had arranged beforehand to meet up with Grit and Michaela, and Ali, Nick, Chantelle, Rhiannon and Andy. We also found out that Justine and Sally were going to be there, and bumped into Jen and Woolly. I also, completely by surprise, found Rosie and Linda - friends from Kennet Valley - who proved extremely useful in letting us hide heavy stuff under their stall.

After we got tired of looking at yarn (yes it can happen eventually) we wandered back to the hotel for some drinks, and then to a pub for dinner and some more drinks. The place Alice picked out for us was awesome, there’s some photos on her blog.

I didn’t bring home very much, and I didn’t take my camera to the event I’m afraid, but I have some photos… Books:

And some yarn which will look lovely once it’s woven into a scarf (yes, I know it already looks lovely - it’ll look more lovely).

Are you sensing a theme? Then this arrived in the post today:

And unpacked to reveal this:

Only one page of instructions, so I took a deep breath and picked up the screwdriver… how am I doing?

And finally:

There were an awful lot of bits left in the box at the end of the instructions. This thing didn’t come with a book, so I’m going to have to wing it with the chapter on rigid heddles in the Ashford book I was given by mum.

Any tips hugely appreciated!

Fibrey stuff that happened while I was away…

I didn’t get any actual weaving done but I did read all of Mum’s weaving books (and snuck a couple home with me) and spun up the warp for my first project.

It’s merino/silk blend from Wingham Woolwork and it’s spun to a fairly firm 2-ply. More on that later.

On my last day at the farm we went to the Field Days, which is kind of like a county fair but without the competitions - so lots of displays and people selling and demonstrating stuff. I fell in love with Supernova:

And begged for and subsequently brought home some of his fleece:

I also wept that there was no room in my suitcase for these:

But luckily, Mum has a whole farm and is going to buy a dozen or so Yay!

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In other news, I got copies of Having Hope printed and will be selling them to people I bump into, and I might put them in a couple of shops. Alice may also be stocking them at Socktopus. I’ll keep you posted.

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Wonderwool this weekend :-D