knitty gritty

It's been a while since my last blog, this has a lot to do with the vegetable plot and poly tunnel.
Most crops are in now, I just need a bit more rain to get things going.

Knitter sister came down from Greenock with the latest knits from Minnie and Moira's fleece.

First this goegeous little girls cardigan, its incredibly warm and soft.

Then another hat, this one smaller than the last.

And finally a pair of wrist warmers with a dashing cable down the back and Moira's beautifully soft black fibre trimming around the hand.


We had a great weekend and I taught knitter Sister the rudiments of spinning and felting. She produced her own ball of wool from the bats prepared at the last blog and we created this little bag using jacobs sheep wool, decorated with alpaca and merino.


Lastly, littleholder produced a bag of scrap leather and we spent a happy couple of hours creating these cute little drawstring purses.

Happy days!

The Tufty club

I still have more than half of Pela's fleece waiting to be processed. I found that (in my short and very limmited experience) getting a perfect ball of wool requires a considerable ammount of time and effort in the fleece prep. department so I spent a couple of hours flick carding some of the fleece one small tuft at a time.


The easy part is now feeding this through the drum carder to produce batts. This mixes the sun bleached tips throughout the fibre and should prevent the uneven pattern seen in my crocheted scarf. I just have to spin it now. The resulting ball of wool will have taken about five hours to make!

Pixie loves alpaca fleece, she stole two of my early balls of wool, tangled them up and hid the evidence under the bed.


For some light relief, I rustled up another felted scarf (you have to keep up the practice) in blue merino with black and green alpaca.(no we don't have green alpacas, it was just a failed attempt at dyeing)

Tap dancing with seaside rock

I have been getting to grips with felting, inspiration came from Liz at the Futurity. I first tried a pebble bag using some jacob sheep wool. The bag worked fine but the bit of chiffon used to keep the pebbles in place kept floating away so I gave up on that and just made a plain bucket bag. I don't have a photo as it was a pressie for my friend the jacob sheep owner and she arrived before I could get the camera out.

Next I thought to try the lacey merino scarf, it ended up looking like a stick of seaside rock and was too short to wear! (felting tends to shrink stuff).



Time for a longer piece of merino in violet and using black fibre from Moira to fasion a scarf for my son's girlfriend, this was more successful as I used bubble wrap on the top as well as the bottom of the scarf. This seemed to keep the fibre in place during the felting process. ( see the way technical terms are already creeping into my vocab.)

Pela in a spin and crochet in the crocuses

I have started spinning my last fleece, this one from Pela, a fawn girl. Its always tempting to blame the tools but really I'm just not an expert yet. This ball was about 60% even and acceptable and 40% thick or thin which is an improvement.

There is only so much substandard wool I can pass on to Knitter sister so I taught myself to crochet and created this rather dashing scarf. The buttonhole was too big for my button so I created a piece of felt from Pela's seconds to make the button larger.

The future's bright...........

The alpaca futurity is a weekend packed with all things alpaca. This year's seminars were mostly about the fleece, spinning and felting. I took part in a felting workshop which greatly inspired me. My feet had hardly touched home soil before I was in the workshop and up to my elbows in warm soapy water. My creations leave a lot to be desired but they are original, the black and white scarf has a layer of Moira on one side and some of Minnie on the other side so 100% alpaca. The other piece has a background of blue dyed alpaca and a centre square of merino with some alpaca.

If You Want To Get [ahead] Get a Hat

The knitter sister's latest creation is a rather comfy, very warm black and white hat, knitted as with the tea cosy from some of my earliest balls (of wool). Modelled here by Mrs Littleholder...

Felt Good

Books taught me the basic methods of felting. It's a simple process in it's basic form and can quite easily be a complete accident (think expensive woolen jumper on too hot a machine wash). I've made a few small felted pieces - a brooch, some bookmarks and a few sample pieces (A4 size). I've also purchased some felting needles and created a rather useless blue circle of felt (which is almost something useful, but not quite).