swimming in gorgeous fleece

I swear I've been knitting (just boring stuff), but what I've really been doing is enjoying some of the most fabulous weather the UK has thrown at me since I moved here three years ago.

Also, last week I went to Devon on residential with 46 nine year olds. It was fun, but phew! Am I ever knackered. :)

As soon as we arrived at the farm, I noticed that there were two lovely alpacas. I got up the nerve to ask the farmer about the fleeces and he said he just gave them away to whomever wanted them! I am now the proud owner of five half-full bin bags of alpaca fleece from two lovelies named Inca and Aztec.



I haven't checked in all of the bags (they are very dusty, having been in a barn for a year or two!) but I think I've got more of the brown than the white. I sense a jumper coming on...

Speaking of fleeces, I also bought a sheep's fleece at my guild's fleece sale in June. It's an enormous black Zwartbles. Just check out the crimp on this baby!



I just need to start washing all this, and get a wheel, and some carders...

Shed Cake

A couple of weeks ago, it was requested of me that I make a cake in the shape of a shed as a surprise for a friend. Now... I've never made a layer cake and I've not got that much experience at cake decoration, especially with fondant. Oh well, I thought, what the hell...

Ok, I must admit, I cheated and used Betty Crocker for both the cake and the frosting, but I didn't want to have some crazy disaster because I'd chosen the wrong recipe. Also, Betty's cakes are pretty damn tasty.

So, two pans to start, and a pattern based on the size of the bread tin:



A Stack of Cake, which was a bit wonkier than intended (the square cake didn't rise evenly), although of course once the fondant was on it didn't really matter. Much.



The Window Side. I ran out of green food colouring, it was really intended to look darker! The shed was coloured by marbling chocolate and white fondant.



The Name Side. Complete with Roman numerals so as not to shock one when thinking about one's age.



Fondant is a bit tricky to work with, and I'd definitely use a marzipan layer underneath next time to smooth it all out, but generally the decoration was fun!

Little Things

I've got lots of little crafts from the past while that don't deserve their own posts, so I've saved them up for y'all.

My first felting project! I got a bag full of rainbow-coloured merino, and a bunch of white Cheviot ('cuz it's cheaper!) and did my best to turn them into felt sheets. They weren't really holding together, so I threw them in the drier for 20 minutes, and oh boy presto-change-o, beautiful thick felt... a bit thicker than I'd planned, but oh well! I sewed them together different than originally intended and got a great needle book anyways.

Outside:



and Inside:



A pair of Jaywalkers, using the same shaping as my last pair, yet somehow coming out slightly bigger. (Oh well.)



New buttons for Forecast, making it actually wearable:



And a great charity-shop find!

new-old skirt

Years ago, when I lived in Boston, I had this skirt. It was black with a black flowery organza overlay, and I bought it at a thrift store. I loved it, even though it had a tear and I had to pin up the waistband because it was too big. I had a grand plan to remake it, and found some fantastic back velvet burn-out for the top layer.

Then I moved to Vermont, and then Seattle. The fabric, and the dream, came with me. The old skirt fell to pieces and was thrown away. In Seattle, I laid out the fabric on my expansive hardwood floor (the cat always loves this) and cut it. I taught myself to do a French seam, masterfully attached the waistband, and put in the best invisible zipper I've ever done.

And only then did I bother to try it on. It was too big. WAY too big.

So it went into a box and got shipped across the Atlantic to me, where it sat for another three years until I got to feeling like if I screwed up resizing it, I'd at least be trying. And it worked! I even redid the French seam. The waistband has a seam in it now, and that's the only evidence that anything was done to it,



I did the hem using the rolled hemmer foot on my machine. It's not perfect, but you have to look pretty close to see that, so I count it as a win. And just look how it spins! Made of win.

in a mad spin

The guild of which I am a member (The Oxford Guild of Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers) is running a context, and naturally, I had to enter it. (Longtime readers will remember that the last contest I entered resulted in this.)

The theme of the contest was to create something based on Wordsworth's poem Daffoldils, so I chose to base my work on these lines:

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

My never-ending line being handspun yarn!

So I got to work, first dying the wool (using food dyes and tea), felting daffodil heads, and spinning green "stem" yarn.



I then sewed together the trumpets and petals of the daffodils using vintage embroidery thread (that's a whole 'nother post), and plied - three plies of spindle-spun and one of embroidery thread bearing the daffodil heads - four plies altogether.

Here's the result, of which I'm fantastically proud!



And other of it all piled up:

selbu modern

Finally, a stranded knitting project! Sure, I'd done a bit of stranded knitting here and there, but nothing big. I picked up a strickfingerhut and this helped a lot, as I could carry both yarns over my left hand. It's also a bit of a pain, however, and caused me to pull my floats too tight sooo... not certain I'll use it again.



The contrast isn't very strong, and the yarn was smaller than that called for in the pattern, so the hat is a bit small and needs re-blocking with a larger plate, but at this rate, it can wait until next winter, when hopefully I'll have a pair of mittens to match!



Pattern: Selbu Modern (free)
Yarn: Wensleydale Longwool 4-ply
Needles: US 1.5, 2.5 mm

turning japanese i think so

Moving on on the whole "everyone's having babies" thing, I've made some baby kimonos, for another coworker. I may give both or I may not, but they certainly didn't take long to make! I'd two linen skirts, one old, one new, and neither fit but the material was nice so I cut them up for this project!



I know, the ties go different ways. I couldn't remember which was the "boy" way, so I just made one of each. :)

Here's a picture of the back, showing where the centre seam on the skirt was:


And here they are together:



The pattern is the Simple Kimono by Habitual: well written with lots of clear pictures. I'd make it again!

baby-plosion

I have reached that stage in my life where it seems as though everyone is having babies. Thus, my baby-crafting list is growing by leaps and bounds.

First off the block is a sleep sack - knitted, in part, to use up some of my neverending stash of cotton-ease.



I have to photograph this one about 4 minutes after I finished it, just before I wrapped it up. So close to the wire! It was originally meant to have a ducky embroidered on it, but it was looking wonky, so I settled on the contrast stitching at the shoulders, instead. Fairly easy, but man, do I hate applied I-cord.

We apologise for the interruption

Oh, so I have been crafting this last month or two, and I've plenty enugh to blog about, but I've also been buying a house and moving into it! It's the ultimate DIY and crafting project! But none of that, yet.

Spinning first.

I borrowed a friend's spinning wheel while she went off on a long holiday to the southern hemisphere, and while I wasn't moving, I came up with some stuff.

First, an attempt at woolen-style spinning, complete with handfashioning "rolags" and such. It came out incredibly squishy, if not actually that even. But who cares? Squishy wins.



It's a 2-ply in Merino which I bought in Seattle, 5 ounces or so. Nice colours mixed into it.



Second, a hand-dyed number. I took Supercook food dye and Lemonade flavour Kool-Aid and a Lot of tea, and dyes 100g of Bluefaced Leicester to look like this.



And then spun it up as a 3-ply.



I'm very happy with both! The first is going to a friend and the second is going to be slippers, I think.

T-shirt quilt - finished!

If I had more energy, I'd have an artful shot of it draped around me or something, but I'm lazy, and our chip wall paper (as a backdrop) isn't very attractive.

So here it is, hurrah! All my favourite t-shirts of yore, carefully stowed for years and finally brought out to shine all together.



You might notice that I've arranged the blocks in a sort of checker(draughts)board between white/light and black/deep coloured tees. I think it came out subtly enough, anyways I am pleased with the arrangement.

I knew I was either going to use fleece as the sole backing or the batting, as my quilt would be tied every 16 inches - I don't think any normal batting would stand up to that! Of course, I forgot to actually measure said quilt and said fleece, so it wasn't *quite* as wide as the quilt. Nevermind, I sorted it out with the binding.



All in all, it's lovely and cozy and exactly the size of the top of a UK King/US Queen size bed, pretty impressive! The sashing fabric is shot cotton from the Rowan Kaffe Fassett line, and the binding is something random which was cheaper and happened to match. ;) If you'd like to know the meaning behind all the tees, click on this picture to take you to the flickr page, with notes!