A Crazy few weeks, but still things get done.

 What odd and icky weather we've had.   Sunday we had frost warnings and apparently there was a frost delay on the local golf courses.   It's been cool, so cool that we've had to run the wood stove until the very end of May, which has never happened before.   Today though, was lovely and I got to hang laundry, dry fleece and spend a lot of time outside, without a toque, mitts and sweater.

The garden is half planted.  The beds aren't warm enough yet to plant the beans and I'll need to get a few more onion sets as a raccoon got a few the first night I planted them.  I've now got towers of tomato cages protecting freshly planted seeds and seedlings.   I've a couple of pots left to clean out and have a few more bags of composted manure to spread.  The cool weather though, means that everything else I'd like to plant is delayed anyway, so I'm not really behind.

Today I saw this pretty butterfly that I identified as an Eastern Swallowtail. It was gathering nectar from a late flowering lilac bush, a Persian Lilac.   Its scent is different from a true lilac, but it always flowers.  Since it flowers after the true lilacs, it nicely extends the season, which is good for extra colour in the garden.

I've started washing Dorset/Friesian cross fleece that A gave me.  The first batch was done my usual way, which was 3 washes and 3 rinses.  It works well and the dirt and lanolin was all gone.  Today, I soaked the fleece in water for a couple of hours before washing it.  I was going to  soak it 24 hours, but then A called up asking if I was available for a spinning day tomorrow.  To make sure I had enough fleece to spin, I drained it, washed it twice and rinsed twice.   Instead of using my salad spinner to spin out the water, I whizzed the laundry bag of fleece around outside.  I was amazed at how quick and effective this was.   I laid the fleece out on the deck,  between sheets of screening on a laundry rack.  It dried in just a few hours.  I've now run a few bats through a drum carder to use tomorrow!

It's really dark black, not grey.

I made a hat for a Christmas present for my daughter.   It's black.  I was going to make black mittens to go with it, but have decided that I really don't like knitting with black yarn that much.  It was commercial dyed black and the stitches were so difficult to see.  I think I started it 8 times before I bought a new, very short needle to make it work.  I'm very happy with how it turned out though.  I over exposed the photo so that the pattern could be seen, because it looked solid black otherwise.

The grey and black sock yarn scarf is off the loom and needs to have the fringes twisted and to be wet finished.   I'm not going to pass judgment on it yet, as I think wet finishing will remove the spinning oils and could end up with a different feeling project.

The SCA A&S event on the May long weekend was a success despite a bit of rain and some very cool weather.   It took me almost a week to unwind from it, which is mainly because I picked up a couple of good novels,  an Ann Cleeves mystery and a hilarious sort of romance by R.J. Blain.   I do enjoy a few days just to read.    

A good start to May

We've had a very slow time easing into spring.  We've had snow storms, ice storms, wind, rain and cool weather.  We're even still loading up the wood stoves because the evenings are cool or uncomfortably damp.  However, that doesn't seem to stop Mother Nature from keeping things from happening.    There is a green haze on most of the trees.  We have baby leaves!   The oak trees and a few other very late  leafing deciduous trees aren't quite there yet, but they never are this early.   Some of the flowering trees are in bloom.   We always have leaves on most of the trees by Mother's Day, and despite people's worries about the trees leafing out late this year, it's happening just like it should.

I got my little tray of watercolour paints out and played around with some new techniques to make non-wintery scenes.   I've played with flowers, winter scenes obviously because I paint my Xmas cards, and have started experimenting with summery scenes.   These 2 worked out well enough that I'm happy with them, but I'll practice some more. While I've seen a few sunsets like this one, with pale colours, many of ours tend to be a bit more dramatic with deep oranges and purples.  Sunrises though, often have pale pinks and lilacs, if you catch the right time.  They are fast and the colours don't last all that long.   I decided to send out a few birthday cards though, so I figured I should practice about bit for summer cards.

I've been spinning up some of the leftover bits and pieces from my "stash" of leftovers from over the years.   This is some green ramie.  I had purchased 1/2 lb of it, and spun up maybe 3/4 of it and left the rest.    I remember it being quite slippery and an effort to spin.   Obviously my skills have developed because instead, it's just effortlessly sliding off my fingers into lovely, fine singles.    I should have divided it into two equalise pieces of roving before I started though, so I could have spun two bobbins for plying.  Instead I'm going to have to much around with either guessing or plying from a centre pull ball.   While that is how I first learned to ply, I've found over the years, that you have to be very careful when plying fine yarns from centre pull balls, so that they don't collapse in on themselves and tangle before you finish plying.  It's been fun to spin though, because I don't seem to have to really think a lot about it while spinning.  It means I can chat or "egads" watch the hockey game at the same time.

This is my friend A's dog Teddy.   While he's getting older and a bit greyer, with thinning fur, he still blends remarkably with the rug.  He's exactly the same colour as the rug and in the right light, and angle, the parts of him that are his original colour really could be the rug.   He's a sweety and a very cuddly dog with his kids.   Today though was funny as he was sleeping when I arrived for spinning day and he didn't notice for about a 1/2 hour.  Then of course, as the good watch dog he is, he made sure to let everyone know that I was visiting.. too funny.

Just playing around with colour

I found a ziplock baggie with 89g of white merino stashed away.   It wasn't in a place where I expected it to be.   I pulled out the slow cooker which never got hot enough to actually finish cooking whatever food was in it, and put in a couple of inches of water, and a few glugs of white vinegar.  I put the merino roving in to the slow cooker to soak for a bit, then turned it on and added some red and yellow dye.

I'm happy to say that while I never actually was able to finish cooking a meal in this slow cooker as it never seemed to get hot enough, it did an admirable job with dyeing.   I did keep a check on it now and again, but I was pretty much worry free.   After a few hours in the pot and the dye was exhausted, I turned off the crock pot and let it cool down overnight.   The next morning I pulled out this lovely flame coloured roving.    Yay for colour!

Then in the same box, of odds and ends, I found a bag of purple and pink mill ends which I'd dyed a while ago.  I didn't feel like dragging out the drum carder, so I just pre-drafted the bits that I could and hand carded the rest.  

Once I'd finished spinning the second bobbin of cotton, and plying the two for 318 yards of white 2 ply  cotton,  I started spinning the purple/pink.   I'm on the second bobbin so will hopefully get to start plying soon.   There isn't a lot of it but it's pretty and after spinning all sorts of white fibres over the past few months, it has been a joy to play with colour.

Playing with colour and paints.   The top row is trying out a new set of watercolours in pans.  The bottom row of cards is using the old gouache paints I've had for ages.  So much fun!

Holiday Projects.

Over the holidays, I did a bunch of spinning.  The small orangey skein is some pumpkin coloured fibre I spun a while back.   There wasn't a lot of it as I was just playing with colours, so the skein is small.  The white is Merino, very fine and very soft.  It was the end of some sliver that was leftover from another project.  Most of this was spun with a long draw.  I really should have carded it first, as the sliver and fibre was old and a bit compacted in places.   The resulting yarn is a bit uneven in places, but still soft, springy and will make awesome mitts or a hat.
I've started into a bag of grey superwash merino.   I'm guessing there was about 100 g or so, but I didn't weigh it first.  This is the second bobbin and I'll be ready to ply it soon.  It's rather nice because the colour is a bit variegated and interesting to both spin and look at.

The guild is looking for ideas for an upcoming class.   We have had suggestions of pin weaving jewellery, cute woven buttons and stick weaving.  Here is my contribution to ideas, which is a coiled basket.   If it were in the late summer or early autumn, I'd have used either ditch lily leaves to make cording or tried to find a bale of Timothy hay, which would also work well.  However, they are wet project materials and ours needs to be dry, so I used para-cord for this one.  I had this small 1/4 in size on hand for this sample.  I tried most of the feed stores and hardware stores locally but I couldn't find larger  hemp or even jute rope around anywhere.   I have a larger poly braided cord to do another sample at some point.  This little basket took about 3 1/2 hours to finish.

I've dressed the loom with a wool warp in a simple herringbone twill.   It will become a blanket.   Because it's a twill and I only have 4 shafts to work with, I'm doing the blanket in halves and will join it in the middle.   The red stripe was a second choice.  My first was a lighter blue, but it turned the other colours were just a tad thicker in grist.  It felt odd as I was winding the warp and it was easier to just switch out the colour that try to figure out if it would work as is, or did I need a different sett.  This is a couch blanket for cooler evenings and for the kitties to sleep on.

Kettle dyeing warps -the start

I've been planning to do a project using double weave -  a weave structure where you weave 2 layers at once.   This can be to bring up secondary colours into a project which wouldn't normally be possible, or to make tubes, attaching at both sides or in my case, because I want a double wide fabric, without having to stitch it together, I'm going to be attaching it at one side.   It's going to be a wool blanket/cloak.

  I wanted it to be brown.  I have brown wool, but it's the wrong weight.  In the wool I had planned to use, I only have dark green, white and red.  I realize that if I did the warp in green and the weft in red, it would likely appear brown from a distance, but when I twisted the two yarns together, there was still to much contrast for me.  I didn't want a green and red flecked blanket!   So I decided to dye the green.    I looked at my large cone of wool yarn which weighed about a kilo and realized I'd have to skein it off before dyeing.   I figured I'd skip a step and dye warp chains.   This is a valid way to dye and often is used in painted warp techniques.

figure 8 tie on remaining warp length

As I was winding my warp, I realized that this was a good time to document some of the ways to do this, or at least the way I was doing it this time.  In order to let the dye circulate around the fibres, instead of choke ties, I use figure 8 ties.   They keep the warp in order but still let the dye reach all the fibres.  If you don't do this, you'll get tiny white spots... ask me how I know!

I do put a choke tie at each end of the warp.  I tie it really tightly.  This keeps the warp in order it two places, so I can shake it out and still have control.  I also tied the centre of the cross securely, although not so tight it's bunching together.  Just enough so it's flat.  There may be a bit of white there, but it's in the thrums or loom waste, so it's fine.   I could tie at least the two cross ties near the very end tightly too, but I sometimes find it squashes up the warp for a bit down the line.  Since I wasn't as generous with the loom waste as I usually am, I used figure 8 ties to be certain.  

The figure 8 ties down the rest of the warp are at least 1 per yard.  I'd rather have two many ties, than end up with a tangled warp.   Painting the warp and steaming it has little movement of the warp, so it's safer.  However I'm kettle dyeing this, so tangling is more of an  issue.   Better safe than spending hours untangling.   It's not like I have tons of extra yarn as I had only 1 cone of the green.

I had 5 warp chains.  Only 100 threads would fit on my warping board smoothly and I was fine with that as it would dye more easily in smaller bouts.  Two of the chains were for either side of a single warp strip to be on one end, so they were specific numbers to make up the width.    I stuck them in a pot of warm water to soak all morning.   When I decided to dye, I'm glad I took them out of the pot because this is what the water looks like!  YIKES - that is a lot of green.

I ended up changing my process slightly because of this dye running from the original skeins.  Instead of dyeing in a deep kettle, where I was going to have to do 2 carefully calculated batches to hopefully the same colour, I used the pan I use for low immersion dyeing and zig zagged them fairly close together.   I doubled up the vinegar but the same amount of salt and will add half the vinegar to start and the rest, half way through.  I have a few concerns that something will not work right. The brown dye seems to have absorbed but there is still green seeping into the water.   The yarn has no brown to it yet.   I will play around with adding some red to it as well, since red and green make brown.

Here are some squishy, dense, fat yarns that I'm spinning up for sample rug hooking tests.  The two from the left are nice and were nice to spin.  The third white one, was kind of icky.  It was a commercial roving that I didn't like at all.  It was easy to spin though.  I may save it for a beginner spinning class as it gives good results.  The last one is a nice yarn but oh, so much work.  It was the fleece I've been washing.  After that found that it was best to run it through a drum carder and then to comb it to get the VM out.  Most of what didn't come out in the combing, came out in the spinning.   A lot of work in comparison to the finished product.

I'm back

October has been a write-off month for getting personal projects done.   The guild found a new studio so it seems like everything was about getting the space finalized, the equipment moved in and organized.   We met with the building owner both productively and unproductively.  We had two moving days, one where we got a few of the looms in and the second where the movers came and brought the library, shelves, the 12 and 8 shaft looms, reeds, shuttles and what I've now come to realize is enough heddles to supply several generations of weavers.  It seems like I've had little time to finish up my own projects in between.

Not to say I got nothing done.   I wound a warp.   I dressed the loom.  I re-threaded the last 1/3 of the threads a second time.  I re-threaded the last 60 threads 2 more times.   I finally added 3 repair heddles and was done with it.    It is the project for my September guild challenge, where we brought in 50 g of thread or fibre and pulled someone else's out of the hat.   I got a partial spool of 2/8 cotton in a light gold colour that was handed over by Kathryn with the comment that she hated that colour.   This is what I've done with the colour.  I didn't have enough thread to do stripes on both sides though.

 I finished spinning the blue and plying the multi-coloured singles for the blue marled yarn.   There are almost 600 yards here.  There is way more than enough yarn for a pair of socks here, so now I'm not sure what to do with it all.   It seems a waste to pull 200 yards out of it for socks and then not have enough for a larger project.  Then again, I don't like knitting shawlettes or scarves, which would use the full amount.   I guess I need to see about a possible weaving project.  That would eat it up pretty quickly.


I have some tow linen on the wheel.   It's not advertised as such, but that is what it is.  It is some special linen roving or sliver.   However, it is made with shorter bits.  So far the longest strands are maybe 10 inches long.  Most are between 6 and 8 inches.  There is lots of short stuff too, fuzzy bits about 2 inches more and definitely less.  It's strong thread, needing scissors to cut it rather than just being able to break the thread with your hands.   There seems to be a limit as to how fine I can spin it as well, so I might just keep this as singles and use it that way.   It's a bit fuzzy because I didn't bother to spin it wet. It's so processed that I found it didn't really make a difference either way, so it was easier to not wet it, than to do so.

It's Hallowe'en, Apparently we don't need the apostrophe any more and spell check doesn't like it with it.  I didn't even have time to put together a costume this year.  Oh well, more time to work on it for next.    I did get an 1830's hat pattern from Westfield so that I could try making one or two over the winter.   There is definitely a shortage of hats from that era in the costume department.

Wind storm productivity

The windstorm blew through our area, knocking down trees, hydro poles and creating a mess.   After a brief shudder in the electrical system, it all shut down.  We were lucky in that we were without power for just less than 30 hours.   I had someone ask me what we did and how did we survive?   Well, mainly, once the wind had died down, we went outside.   Wood was split.  Wood was stacked.   Branches were picked up.  Sticks were raked.   A quick run into town to get more gas for the generator which keeps our sump pumps running, also resulted in brunch at a fast food restaurant with wifi, so I could check my FOOL event email.   I was surprised at how many people had their tablets out while we were there.  

 Finally, tiring from yard work, I dragged out a bit of fibre that I had dyed two winters ago and only got part of it spun up.   I started spinning the rest.  I realized that I hadn't divided it into two, so when I started on the second bobbin, I made sure to use one with the same finish as the first.  Then when I was almost done, I weighed them both and divided the last of the sliver so that they equaled the same.   I was off by a couple of partial grams, but in the end that resulted in one bobbin having 2 yards more than the other, so I wasn't upset about that at all.    I plied them together, but with the busy day with yard work, I was literally falling asleep while plying.  I had to force myself to stay awake so that the cats wouldn't demolish the yarn from the Lazy Kate to the wheel.   Once it was done, I soaked it for a bit and set it to dry.  The next morning I took a good look at it and was pleasantly surprised.   Half of the yarn was spun by task light and candle light, in the near dark.   I was expecting some very noticeable inconsistency, but nope, you cannot tell that this was half spun in the dark!  Yay Me!

I love hyacinths.  I love how they look and especially the scent.    I like to take my tea and my spinning wheel or banjo out on a warm, still, spring day and watch the leaves grow while the scent of hyacinths lingers in the air.    We've had nothing but windy days so far this spring.   I've scented the flowers once, when I was on the ground taking this photo.   I fear that with the way the flowers are popping up and speeding through their growth cycle, as if to make up for this year's lingering winter, I shan't get to have my day bathed in hyacinth scent.  

Yes I realize that this photo is on a weird angle.  Just as a warning, don't get down low to take a photo when the chooks are about.  They are curious birds and like to know what you are doing.   They will walk on you, peck you gently or not so gently and generally just get up close and personal trying to figure out what you are doing, trying to slither on your belly to get that perfect shot, which won't be so perfect in the end, when you jump out of the way of Ms. Curious Hen.  (They poop indiscriminately too, so watch out for that as well)

Bobbins Emptied! Yay!

 Ta Da!  I've emptied 9 bobbins of bits and pieces of the tail end of whatever I'd been spinning and either ran out or got distracted.   The 10th bobbin is holding reeled silk from level 6, Master Spinner at Olds College.  I need to wind that off onto holding bobbins. The bobbin isn't needed immediately,so the silk is safe where it is for the moment.  It was interesting digging up all the bobbins and figuring out what was on each one.   It turns out I'd stashed the bobbins together, so the hunt for them wasn't all that difficult, once I'd figured out where I'd put them.

There was a bit of natural green cotton left on one bobbin.  It was still wet and wouldn't cooperate with being turned into a skein.  I'm pretty sure the larger white skein is Merino.  I'm not sure about the small one, because it's a little bit whiter, but it feels just as soft.   The Merino/Cashmere/Silk is easy to identify because I'd dumped a bunch of it into the exhausted vat of Japanese Indigo, just to use up the last of the dye.   I've a large zip-lock full of it. 
The Ramie isn't an end of bobbin but was a 50 gram bag that I'd spun up.  The colour is oddly called sunrise, and I'm presuming it is the sky colour at sunrise.  However if I had ordered this site unseen on colour alone, I'd have been quite surprised.  This bit of ramie shows that all commercially processed sliver and roving isn't the same.  The dark blue that I'd spun before (aptly named midnight) was long fibres, smooth and easy to spin.  This stuff was chock full of short bits and neps.  The short bits were less than 2 inches long, often only an inch and a lot of the neps just got spun in as they were well blended into the fibre.   Even when picked out by hand, they wouldn't budge.  It took a lot more concentration to spin this pale blue ramie.  If I'd gotten this bag of Ramie the first time I'd ever spun it, I'd be turned off the fibre.  However Ramie is generally lovely to spin and a nice bast fibre.

I've often mused over why the packaging of so much fibre in 50 g amounts.  It's great for sampling, for sure, but I find it not so great for actually using in a project.  I'm going to have to just keep getting 50 g of Ramie and spinning it up until I have enough to use for a real project, instead of just decorating a bin or basket.

Portland Sheep Fleece

A friend gave me a bag of Portland fleece.  This is a less improved breed of sheep, considered to be closer to it's early counterpart, than many modern breeds.   It is a pretty sheep, small,with a handsome face and horns.   It is known to be easy to keep,  has only a single offspring but can do so out of season.    Interestingly, it is born red, but turns white within a few months    The bit of fleece I got came from a very well kept sheep.  It had virtually no VM.  It wasn't greasy or dripping with lanolin. 
It had a nice staple length of about 4 1/2 inches and a nice, regular crimp, though it's difficult to see in the photo. 
The fleece was in lovely, well defined locks as well, and I debated whether to wash it all together or separate out the locks out into screen envelopes.   I decided that since I'd intended to hand card it into rolags and spin it with the long draw, I could just wash the fleece without separating the locks.

It took only 2 washes and 2 rinses to get the fleece sparkling white!  I let it dry for a few days on my drying rack, with screening on both the bottom and top of the fibres.   Once dry, I carded the fleece into rolags and had such a fun time spinning it.   It spun so beautifully and made a bouncy, airy yarn with little effort.

Being a primitive down breed, the fibre is a bit on the coarse side, so it is definitely not for close to the skin.   But that breeder should get kudos for producing excellent fleeces.   This would make awesome mittens or outer wear.   I probably should have saved some fibre out for a sample of worsted yarn, but the long draw was effortless with this fibre, so I went with it.

Yarn disaster, lovely days and Pysanky

While it snowed again and was blustery last night, earlier in the week it was warm enough to hang laundry outside, two days in a row no less!   It was gloriously warm and sunny, with a bit of a breeze so all the laundry actually dried completely as well.  I like hanging the laundry out, so when we get a couple of bonus days like we just had, I always try to take advantage of them.

I finished plying the first skein of the Merino/Alpaca blend I've been spinning.   Last night I washed it and hung it to dry.  I even paid attention to where I was hanging the skein, to try to keep it out of reach from kitty paws and jaws.   However this morning, despite my efforts, the skein was messed up and chewed to pieces.  Nobody knows which kitty it was though and not a single kitty it looking at it as if it were prey today.    So is yarn only a toy at night?   It seems that all the cats will ignore it during the day but it is fair game in the dark.   Now I need to find a safer place to dry skeins! 

I'm calling these my warm up Pysanky.   I'm doing a demo at the end of the month and need some samples.  Knowing how long it takes to write each egg, I thought that I'd start early.  I'm pretty happy with these two eggs, though the contast on the blue and turquoise one could be a bit better.

  I'm hoping to have not only a selection of different designs to show, but eggs in different stages of decoration to work on during the demo.  I think it would be easier to show to process that way, rather than just explain it while working on eggs as it takes even longer to decorate an egg while talking.     I will definitely try to keep them a bit safer from little hands this year.  I'm getting my daughter to do a supply run to the Ukrainian store in the city for me.   I'm trading her maple syrup and maybe some pie ;)

A busy week

 I've started spinning the 60% Merino/40% Alpaca batts.   I am spinning to get somewhere around the knitting worsted or a bit finer.   We'll see how much bloom this yarn has.  It is very white, so if I'm going to make something for me to wear, I'll have to dye it.  

The guild has a green challenge for the March meeting; to make something green or with green in it.   I'm weaving what I hope will be a guitar strap, however I put it on the floor loom instead of the inkle loom which has both good and bad points.   First, it's easier to treadle than to keep lifting and pushing down the threads,  especially since this thread is fairly sticky and because I still haven't made heddles for the inkle loom which are the correct size.   It's hard to keep it from pulling in too much.   I have it set at 40 threads per inch, but it should likely be a bit wider sett.    The contrast isn't quite enough, but since I was working with a green theme, the only other colour I had which would have worked was pink.  I was fairly certain that the recipient wouldn't have wanted a pink and green guitar strap.   There is a threading error, but the backside is correct, so I left it.  

I found sausage casings in the grocery store of all places.   They are salted and in a little plastic salad takeout type container.  I wanted to only soak half of them, but they were actually knotted up in the container.  I was worried both about ripping them, and how to store the ones I had separated but was not using.  I ended up soaking all of them.   I know now that since the sausage casings are heavily salted, I can just pack them and the salt back into the container and store in the fridge for several months more.  Luckily, they still had some this week, so I purchased another packet of them for future use.  These things are fairly difficult to source in this area.

I was soaking them because I'd found pork loin on sale and turned one of those huge slabs of meat into sausages.   Next time I'd use more fat, but although a bit dry they are tasty.   I was playing around with fat content because I really am not fond of those really fatty, drippy 50% fat sausages.  I'd read you could go as low as 20% fat, but I don't think I had quite that much in this batch.  They were awfully good with gravy though.    I'd purchased a sausage stuffer attachment for the stand mixer at a ridiculous price, but there were only 2 of them in the store and I'd never seen them before.   It was worth every penny of that ridiculous price as I was able to grind, mix and stuff the sausage casings by myself.   It was a bit fussy and for sure, would have been easier to do with 2 people, but wasn't necessary. 

The weather has been warm enough that the maple tree sap is running.   We've only got 6 buckets up right now as it is still early in the season.   We've already got about 80 litres of sap collected so we're doing the first boil today.  We would have done it last night, but it was raining.   The only good thing about rain this time of year is that it has been warm enough that it isn't snow.  I shudder to think of how much snow would have fallen if it had been just a few degrees colder.   Then we wouldn't have that flooding which has been causing horrendous damage  in the area, but no more snow right now-  yay!

Spinning and Knitting

Usually, when I have to wait around for appointments, I bring a sock project to fill in the endless minutes.   However, I didn't have a sock project either on the go or ready to go, so I substituted a pair of mitts.  A gal once described this sort of mindless, patternless project as a potato chip project - which does sort of fit since you just keep knitting without a lot of thought.   I had a lady say to me that she would never have the time to knit as she was sitting in the waiting room doing absolutely nothing, not even reading a magazine.   The lady with her large novel looked at me and grinned.   I told her how many socks I'd knit when I was just sitting around waiting for appointments.   She apparently reads through appointment waiting as well.  The lady doing nothing, still had nothing to show for her time, but I hope she was at least relaxed and refreshed.

One of the guild members is an Alpaca breeder.  She spoke about Alpaca fibres last meeting and commented that any lock 2 inches or less was considered trash and unprocessable.   That is by machine though.   Hand processing those shorter lengths works adequately.  

I dug up a pattern for a sontag from Peterson's magazine - 1861, spring issue I think.  It is different that most of the one's I've seen which are from a Godey's Ladies book pattern.   I'd popped out to get the yarn for the Peterson's pattern but it wasn't on sale and was $8 a skein, and I'd need about 4 or 5 of them.  I decided to spin the yarn instead, which will mean that the project won't be done when I wanted it to, but I'll use up stash fibre.   As this sontag will likely brush my neck, I decided on some Merino Top and Alpaca locks.  I have some lovely brown Alpaca in the same staple length of the Merino, but I didn't have enough brown Merino to be certain of having adequate yardage once spun.   The white Alpaca locks are short.  They are about 2 - 2 1/2 inches long.   They hand card nicely enough but I ran both through the drum carder, sandwiching the Alpaca between layers of Merino.    This worked a treat and I have been carding up lovely, fluffy batts.   I'm using a ratio of 60% Merino to 40% Alpaca.

I got Alpaca from a fundraiser held for a member of the Edmonton Guild who had lost all her fibre equipment during the massive floods a few years ago.  They had Alpaca fleeces, mostly shorter length fibres for a $20 donation.  I was happy to donate and now I'm happy that I'm actually using the fleece.    I'll have to wash the yarn after it's spun as the Alpaca is definitely not clean.

The superwash merino rolags are spun and plied.  It's a pretty yarn, soft, squishy and colourful.   I've no idea what I'll do with it but at least it's done.

 So I was told I had to do practically nothing for a week.  No spinning, no weaving, no banjo, nothing repetitive or requiring strength.   In between reading, and more reading, and reading some more, I made handkerchiefs from scraps of quilting cotton.   My daughter had made me one for Christmas and it is lovely to use, so I whipped up a couple more.   Of course hers was a panel square with a chicken on it.   I decided not to spend anything on these, so they are just plain fabric bits that I had on hand.

 I found these chicken tea towels at the local box store.   I purchased two of them, and cut them in half.   I put a heading at the top and hemmed the two needing hems about the same size as the bottoms of the towels.   When I added the header, I made sure they were all the same size.  I think they make a cute valance for the kitchen.   I had a curtain rod but it had decorative ends which stuck out farther than the space between the window and the cupboard, so I had to get a new curtain rod.   It cost more than the curtains did.

 I was finally able to spin a bit.   This is superwash merino, blended into rolags on a blending board.   Whenever I use the board, I recall my introduction on how to use one, when a gal was doing a demo in one of the spinning classes.   She took all sorts of fibres and slapped them on the board, packing them in until it was overly full.   She pulled off one single huge batt, which looked wonky and horrible to spin.  I couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone would do that or want to spin something like that.   Then I found a video showing how to pull rolags from the blending board.  This makes smooth, easy to spin and very pretty rolags,which I enjoy spinning.  So many different ways of doing things in spinning for sure!

We have a second chimney in our basement.  It was slightly damaged and needed some repair but I haden't been able to find anyone to do it since we first moved here.  That is until a couple of weeks ago when I noticed an ad in a small advertising booklet which came in the mail.   The repair quote was reasonable, but it turned out that we couldn't use the old woodstove that we already had.   Nor could he hook up the cookstove that I had.   Options were a second hand stove from a big box store - cheap but would need replacing in a year or two by his estimation, or a middle of the road stove which would last for years.   Because the price was just within our budget, we went for it.   All was good until they went to install the stove and they had made a mistake and there wasn't enough clearance for those options.  The only alternative stove which fit the clearance specs, was to jump up in quality, doubling the price.  Yikes -  however, it's super low emissions, has two air flow controllers and pumps heat like you wouldn't believe.   It's the stove I wish we had upstairs!   The downside is that when all was said and done, we could have practically paid for furnace for the same price.    The cats love to sleep in front of it and I'm happy it has a pedestal base as I have a friend who had a cat which got burnt from trying to bask in the heat under the stove.

Banjo strap details and hoar frost

With the inkle strap off the loom, I've been playing around with ways to turn it into a banjo strap.  The ends need to clip or tie onto the brackets around the outside edge.  With the commercial strap I have for the resonator banjo, I'd noticed the snap clips were starting to scratch and dent the wood and finish where the two met.  I switched them out for boot laces, which are quiet, hold the banjo securely and look okay.

I'd decided on leather ends as we have some veg. tanned leather sitting around from a previous project.   I could get Chicago screws locally but only in silver/chrome and I couldn't find the slider or strap end loops in silver.  I tried them anyway, but they look wrong, one went in crooked and I put them in backward,so the screw end was on the outside.   If I didn't need the hardware for the strap, the colour would be fine but I didn't like the look of them.   I found a packet of snap rivets in the leather tool box, which looked great but were too long.   I ended up ordering some from a eather supply place, in two colours, both a little bit too long, but workable.    I installed one on a scrap and it worked perfectly.   I got the holes slightly uneven on the second try, but the third was a charm.  I have two strap ends which look pretty much the same.  Yay me!
I wish I had some brown leather dye, but these will work just fine. I still need to get or make laces and decide where the lace holes need to be punched.

I finished spinning and plying the pink and blue superwash roving which I'd found in my stash.   The colours ranged from dark blue to a fairly light pink.  I rather like the colour progression in this.   I just split the strip of roving down the centre to spin two singles and hoped they'd sort of match while plying.   I knew that with the random placement of colours, it might not happen, but it happened enough to not muddy up the colours too much.


Our weather has been so variable lately.  We've had record highs and record lows within days of each other.  Then one morning, I looked outside a little too early, and there was hoar frost.  The whole world sparkled as the sun rose.   I grabbed my camera and started taking random shots, first while the early morning was still foggy and then as the fog lifted.   It only lasted a short while before the skies became grey again, but it was lovely while we had the glorious sunshine and blue skies.  Usually our winter skies, even when it's sunny are pale, watery colours in various shades of grey.