Sometimes Tigs likes to hang around the table loom …. usually under it, but occasionally he gets higher ambitions.

A few minutes later, he was back in his usual position …

The carders are on top of the cloth to stop him lying there, BTW

Well, quite a lot has been happening since my last blog update, but most of it involves sorting stash before we move out, and that would be a boring blog entry. I’ll just say that I have a LOT of yarn and fibre and fibre-related books, and even though I’ve parted with some, it has hardly made a dent in it. Deciding what I need available over the summer and autumn and what I can take to the storage unit is .. well .. difficult.

However, I have managed to get a little knitting done, and some spinning on my amazing birthday present, a Bosworth book charkha. Rumour has it that there is a birthday spindle on its way too :-). I won’t display my attempts at cotton spinning at this stage (maybe soon), but I’m finidng it a struggle even with such wonderful equipment.

As for the knitting, I’m making slow progress on a pair of boring socks and I’ve just finished and blocked a scarf in purple Jaggerspun Zephyr (wool/silk). It is a standard seaman’s scarf with a stitch pattern taken from the centre of the Fiber Trends’ Estonian Garden pattern (see March archive). I love knitting lace in Zephyr!

I can’t resist a little bragging. The cushion got 2nd place out of 18 entries … :-)

Tomorrow is the Annual General Meeting of one of my guilds, and also judging day for the annual Challenge. This year, the challenge is to make something with the two largest dimensions between 9″ and 15″ (in other words, the smallest thing you can enter would be a flat object 9″ square and the largest would be a 15″ cube).

I decided quite early on that one of my entries (as it turns out, my only entry) would be a cushion cover, as my other guild has that as its June challenge (a convenient coincidence). I couldn’t decide which technique to use until about a month ago when I saw an article in the then-latest Handwoven (March/April) about a black Tencel-and-metallic eyelash evening jacket (Sara Nordling’s Evening Star Jacket). The structure interested me, so I adapted it for 10/2 nm (metric count, slightly thinner than #5 pearl cotton) unbleached mercerised cotton.

I dyed some of the yarn in two shades of pale brown (which turned out pinkier than intended) to add variety to the warp and for the pattern weft, and wove it on my Louet Kombo table loom as I have another project on my floor loom. I sampled some variations on the structure but ended up with the same one as in the article. I took the fabric off the loom yesterday, washed and dried it, and this morning I sewed the cushion cover. I’m quite pleased with it.

Here is a closeup of the fabric:

The back is just plain weave, so it shows the warp colour sequence better:

Each year, Kennet Valley Guild holds a skein competition. This year, we were given an ounce of washed mohair locks and asked to combine them with an equal amount of something else and bring the finished skein to the next month’s meeting.

I haven’t had much experience with mohair as I find commercial mohair yarn too scratchy (yes, even kid mohair/silk blends). I considered doing something wild (leaving it as locks and letting the curls hang out of the yarn, or adding in feathers, perhaps), but as usual I left it too late, so I decided play safe.

I blended the mohair with Blue Faced Leicester (my favourite wool breed) on a drumcarder, split the batts into pieces and dyed them separately and then recombined them on the drumcarder, Deb Menz style. The picture top left is the dyed sections. The one below it is after one pass through the carder. I was disappointed with how quickly the colours were blending (I think because there was so little of each colour so the layers were very thin) but I still needed to do another pass to get the batt even enough to spin easily.

I was pleasantly surprised by how it actually spun up. It wasn’t as bright as I’d intended but the combination of the shine of the mohair and the subtle colours reminds me of the splitting of light by a thin oil film on water. No, it didn’t win, but it got enough compliments to make me happy. :-)

First pictures of the finished Estonian Garden scarf/stole – there may be more to follow. Click on these pictures to see larger versions (close popup between clicks, or the second one will come up in the wrong size window):

A friend of ours is going through a difficult time, so some of us have decided to make her an afghan, contributing an 8″ square each made from undyed handspun yarn. I haven’t felt much like spinning lately, so I went digging through my yarn stash. I had very little undyed handspun, but I found some oatmeal Blue Faced Leicester (one of my favourite breeds – soft and lustrous) that had been spindle-spun at demos soon after I learned to spin. It’s rather uneven, and overtwisted in places, which limited the kind of patterns I wanted to use. I spent a while trawling through Barbara Walker’s Treasuries, but finally decided I’d just do a simple seed stitch ‘square spiral’ on a stocking stitch ground.

This is just a quick entry to show off the finished bag, as I have to get ready to go out soon. To give an idea of scale, it is 3.5″ tall as shown.

I did want to do something more interesting with the ends of the drawstring, but I couldn’t find a suitable bead locally, and my attempt to create a ‘beaded bead’ in tubular peyote using the same beads as I used in the knitting were’t very successful. If I had more time, I’d keep trying with that, but I want to send it off tomorrow, so …

… though it looks more like a vase. It will, of course, soften up once it is handled. Now to make a drawstring for it.

Well, that was my answer, and the question was how to block a knitted lace bag that is a small cylinder with a curved bottom. I couldn’t just pin it out like a doily, but it definitely needed blocking. The soy sauce bottle was the closest I could find to the right diameter, the lump of clay gave the curved bottom, and wrapping them in plastic kept the bag clean. Next problem was that the crochet loop edging needed stretching too, so I looped some cotton warp yarn through the thread I’d already run though the crochet loops, through a loop tied around the neck of the bottle, back through the thread and so on, then once it was all in place, I tensioned it carefully. Since that description is probably clear as mud, here is a pop-up picture.