Eeek!

I had no photo for today, so here's a sleepy Billie for you.

Well, whaddya know, this time next week I'll be just an hour away from getting married!  For this reason I haven't really had much time to drop by.  Obviously once the wedding is over I'll have loads of photos and things to share, plus life will get back to normal again.  Today is my final day at work before the wedding, I'll be so busy next week it seemed silly to work.  My colleagues have been so lovely, all asking questions about the wedding and giving me great support.  Today they gave me a lovely card, a picture frame for my desk and a £50 voucher.  I'm so luckily to work somewhere where people are so kind.

Tonight is our rehearsal, Sunday is the stag and hen nights, I have the hairdresser on Tuesday and we need to decorate the church on Thursday and in between we will be working hard on all the million and one other things that have to be done.  Wish me luck!

Spinning......thursday?

This week's spinning round up is a day later than usual due to a bit of a technical hitch with the finishing of my latest handspun.  I could have just posted yesterday anyway, but it was so close to being finished and I really wanted to have an FO to share so please forgive my tardiness.

I finished spinning up the last of my purple batts on Tuesday night but left it til last night to wind off into a skein.  I didn't start until quite late because I spent the evening at the church where I'm getting married planning the decorations, but once I got going it didn't take me long - even with the usual feline 'supervision'

Before the dunking

Next step was to give the yarn a bath, I plopped it in some hot water, wandered off for a few minutes and came back to find that the water had turned to ribena!  Slight colour seepage was not the word.  A bit of dithering later and I sprayed the skein with citric acid and water and stuck it in the microwave for a couple of minutes to try and set the dye.  It seems more colourfast now but I'm a bit disappointed with the blue spots that have developed where the purple has seeped in to the white.  I'm sure it will be fine though.  The yarn is all smooshy and bobbly and goes nicely with the pink I finished last week and that's all I was hoping for.  I guess now I finally get to knit something with my very own handspun - how exciting!

After dunking, the blue bits aren't too obvious here.

Just dropping by

Yet again I’ve been busy, busy, busy and have had little time for blogging.  This is a real shame, but with the wedding now 17 days away I can think of little else.  Not that there is too much to do now, my floral arrangements are now in the hands of my good friend Gayle at Bloomingayles, the venue is all organised, everyone has outfits and I’ve been practicing in my shoes.  All that is really left is for me to finish my wedding shrug, which is now two long rectangles waiting for a third to be complete.  I’m still not terribly inspired by the knitting of this pattern, but I am getting there slowly.

So that’s it, boring eh?  I have however managed to do a very small amount of spinning – possibly I may even have an FO for you tomorrow and I have a new spindle too.  So now I’ve dropped by to tell you how much more interesting tomorrow’s post will be I shall pop off again, ta ta!.

Spinning Wednesday

For the second week in a row I have an FO for you.  Quite frankly it’s about time because I feel like I have been plying this for months.  So here we are, 345m and 46g of 2ply merino tencel from FeltStudioUk.

This has turned out really lovely, smooth and shiny and the colours look great.  This was only half the top and I will start spinning the second lot soon, but because I like a bit of variety I started spinning this instead

 This is some top merino silk I got from Shunklies a little while back.  I decided to make this a bit stripy and found that if I split the top in a certain place I had two matching lengths with just a bit leftover that didn’t match anything.  I’ve therefore split that bit into four skinny strips and am spinning that separately, the idea being that I’ll have a little mini skein with much shorter stripes which I can use to accent the longer striping main skein.  Well that’s the plan anyway, who knows how it will actually turn out!

Dyeing to be yarn

A few months ago I bought 400g of undyed merino fibre to try my hand at dyeing.  It took me a while to be brave enough to actually try it but I have finally taken the plunge.  I’m not sure why I was so apprehensive, I had visions of coming out with a horrible felty mess but I did a bit of reading up to see how to avoid that and still I put it off.  Now I’ve finally got on and done it I think my biggest worry is that I’ve dyed something that looks perfectly fine, but it is only after it is spun and plied and knitted I’ll be able to truly tell if I did a good dye job.  Obviously the same is true with dying yarn, but without the extra (rather time consuming) step in there.  I guess this is something that will come with practice and I probably need the odd disaster to help me learn.  However, here is how dyed my fibre.

I’ll keep you posted with the progress of the yarn, so that if it turns out to be really fugly you can disregard any dyeing advice I may have given!

Birthday, spinning, FO!

Today is Wednesday, spinning update day and I actually have a FO to share - plus it's my birthday so I'm having a great day.  I took today off work and planned to spend it pottering around making bits and bobs and maybe doing some shopping until Stu got home from work.  Imagine my surprise when he woke me up with breakfast in bed this morning after secretly getting the day off work himself.  He even got up at the normal time and went off to the supermarket to get breakfast bits and flowers and make it all extra surprising.  I think he may be a keeper!

So, not much time for making stuff after all, but I did get to do some shopping so it doesn't matter.  I'm currently working on this

This is from the first of the purple karmic delight batts which I am now working on because I finished up with the pink ones - tada!

She was sitting still, I can't help myself!

I love how this ended up, it's really rough and ready and a bit knobbly but it is soft and pretty and I'm really proud of myself. The skein is 30grams and 98m long.  I'm hoping that the purple will spin up just as quickly so I can make something nice and stripy with them.  I'm thinking maybe a nice slouchy hat?

Boredom

With a month to go until my wedding I was forced to assess my progress on my wedding shrug and had to admit that progress had been smidge slow.  Even with the wedding looming I was finding it difficult to motivate myself to knit more endless rows of stockinette.  So I decided to put a reward system in place.  For each 'pattern repeat' completed (i.e 23 rows stockinette, 3 short rows) I was allowed a short break to spin in.  This may have been effective had this not happened just before I finished my first repeat.

2 cats, 2 immobilised people!

Clearly I was not going anywhere, so I just kept on knitting and have finally finished the main body of the shrug.

I made a circle!

Now I just have to do the back pieces, the pattern has them half lace and half stockinette but as soon as I decided to knit this I knew that would bug me and would have to do all lace or all stockinette.  With time shortening I've plumped for the stockinette - boring but at least I can just knit and knit with no need for concentration so hopefully it'll be done in no time.