A bad workman always blames his tools, but sometimes...

The fibre I ordered from Wingham's showed up on Friday afternoon which was impressive considering I only called them on Wednesday afternoon - so top marks to them for prompt delivery!

I had it delivered to work, much to the puzzlement of colleagues who couldn't work out what the bag of squidgy stuff was or why it would be delivered to me. I did try to explain that it was fluff or more precisely fleece for spinning, but met generally blank looks. Fortunately, I resisted the temptation to open the package and make them feel the contents, otherwise I think all credibility may have disappeared at that point.

I was glad the bag was squidgy though, it made lashing it to the back of the bike easy enough, once I'd figured out how to hook on my bungees. Once I did get it home, I wasn't disappointed. Blue Faced Leciester in Humbug looks very pretty and soft and I'm looking forward to seeing how it spins up.

Saturday morning saw me heading off to the Coventry Spinners, Dyers and Weavers Guild for a first time visit. I only stayed for an hour and a half as this was a brief visit to see what they were all about rather than staying for the full day. It was interesting to see so many people with spinning wheels in the same room and the ladies themselves seemed nice enough. I went along with Claire and caught up with both Kellie and Mandy, which helped as walking into somewhere new on your own is always a bit nerve wracking.

Claire spins exclusively on spindles, so I showed her my spindle and my technique and it turns out my spindles are not as good as they could be. She demonstrated spinning on her spindle and with a single flick, she got it spinning for a good 40 seconds compared to the 2-4 seconds I could manage with mine!

I had a go with her spindle and even in my inexperienced and definitely novice hands, that spindle spun for a good 20 seconds before running out of oomph.

Claire gave some advice for rescuing my spindles, which I've passed along to Dave and then very kindly leant me a spindle to try out. I had a go for half an hour yesterday afternoon and look...

The spindle on the left is mine, with the single I'd spun up previously. The spindle on the right is Claire's and I started spinning on it on Saturday and added to it on Sunday. As you can see, besides being very pretty to look at it has a few differences in design such as a much bigger, flatter whorl (the disk at the bottom) which has been turned so the weight is distributed out to the edges, meaning it is well balanced and spins...

And after a practice at home, I can confirm it does spin very well, so well in fact that I managed to spin without using the park and draft method!!!! Admitedly, now I have to watch to make sure I don't draft out to thinly and watch how much twist is sitting just above the spindle or it snaps from over spinning - I have an idea how to fix that, I'm thinking I back spin a little, just in the area above the spindle before winding on - but with the spindle spinning I can concentrate on drafting, which is where I really need to improve.

I was so happy I took the spindle to Dave and made him admire it... I now have suspicions that this will go the same way it did when Esther leant me her sewing machine and I may decide I have to have one just like it... But for now, I shall continue to practice and see how it goes. Thank you Claire!

Claire also leant me a DVD which shows how to use a spinning wheel but I haven't looked at it yet - I'm saving it for next week when Dave will be off in Ripley for the AscendancyLRP tabletop battle.

(As always, click on the pictures to see bigger versions...)

Fluff ordered...

I've just bitten the bullet and placed my first order with Wingham Wools for some Bluefaced Leceister fibre in 'Humbug' which looks like a very pretty blend of natural browns. I wanted something I know will be easy to spin (in theory at least) and from the tiny bit of BFL I've spun on my spindle, I know it should be nice stuff... Besides which I've had a personal recommendation from Mandy.

Not that I've done much spinning lately, although I did get my spindle out for ten minutes on Monday as I drank a cup of tea before rushing into work. I'm beginning to wonder if I need a bigger spindle... I like my little spindle but it doesn't hold much yarn before it's full and I've no idea how heavy it is. When I bought it I didn't know I should worry about such things.

Not much has happened on the knitting front either, although I am plodding away on the second of a pair of manly socks and fast approaching the heel. This is all part of my ongoing aim to finish projects before I start any more. So far so good, I've resisted the lure of casting on... Although it's getting tough to hang in there.

The reason I haven't made much progress was because we headed off on what is my last purely camping LARP event of the year with AscendancyLRP. Not my last event of the year, but at least things start to calm down a little, which is good as work is frightening at the moment.

The event itself was fast paced and structured more like a linear than usual as we moved from site to site in character. We'd traipse off through the woods, while the crew re-invented the dutch barn on site as a new location. What was more the weather was kind to us and it did NOT rain!!!! The clear skies meant it was cold at night but dry, with the mud underfoot steadily drying as the weekend progressed. We even got to use the storm kettle, which has sadly been underused this year due to the miserable weather.

The slugs were still very much in evidence though, including a fat orange one that I caught trying to limbo under the lid of the food box on Friday night. Yuk!

No other news, except that Richard passed us a cardboard tank (i.e. a cardboard box shaped like a tank) for the cats to play with. Dave spent all of Monday night figuring out how to assemble it but once it was put together we realised that the manufacturers had woefully underestimated how big a cat can get. With the turret on, I don't think Charlie could get more than his head inside and Missy would have to do some sort of gymnastics unbecoming of her dignity to manage it.

There was nothing for it but to seperate the turret from the body of the tank, so the cats can at least get inside. We've draped it with cat toys but so far they're avoiding it, preferring their paper bags... But I shall persevere, I think they need to be lured into it with a cat nip laced dangly thing (otherwise known as a fishing rod toy). If they take to it, there may be photo's later.

At last! A finished project!

At last, a finished project to show you! Months and months after starting it, I've finally completed the bag I first described back at the end of July. I must have started work on this bag at the beginning of June, so it's been a long time in the making, far longer than it really should have taken, but I'm putting that down to my hectic weekend schedule.

So with no further ado, let me present the finished crochet motif bag.

As previously described, this bag is an experiment, initially started in the wake of my frustration at being unable to source bits to make bags locally. I have two fantastic books on how to make bags but without a source of handles, straps, D-Rings or clips I was pretty much stuck... So I decided to make a bag anyway, working from my stash.

(A while back, Esther pointed out that I'd overlooked an ad in one of the UK knitting mags for Bags of Handles. The website isn't particularly polished, but they certainly do stock the kind of thing I'm looking for and I'll be checking them at some point in the future.)

I wanted to make a sewn bag and then embellish it with crochet lace. I decided to add beads drawing inspiration from the Crochet Motif Bag described in Easy Beaded Crochet by Carol Meldrum.

The patterns for the motifs are taken from this book although I substituted the mohair I had in my stash (Patons UK Studion Mohair) and changed the hook size, taking it up to 5mm after the recommended hook produced motifs which just seemed too tight. In my opinion, Mohair needs room to be fluffy and mohair like.

I used seed beads from my stash, originally purchased for a beaded headscarf again made a good few years back now. The diameter of these beads is 1mm which was a bit small to easily string onto the mohair. I'd get a few strung on and then the fluffiness of the yarn would make it very difficult to move them along the yarn. There was yarn snappage... I persevered.

Once I had enough motifs, I spent a couple of weeks looking for a button that I liked, eventually buying a new one (the only thing I specifically bought for this project) from Mrs T's in Coventry. I hand sewed a button hole and then tidied it up a bit by adding a chain stitch border, all done in blue perle cotton. Rummaging in my stash of made up cords and braid, I found a matching piece of luceted cord which I doubled over and couched in place to attach the button.

Then came the fun of deciding how to position the motifs and sewing them on, which took several hours and involved a lot of pins.

The final effect is subtle with the beads only becoming visible as the light moves across the front of the bag. Something which is very difficult to catch with a camera, I admit, but I like it.


(As always, click on pictures to see bigger versions...)

Spinning one wet Saturday afternoon...

With the rain pouring down outside to the extent that there are something like 80 flood warnings in place and reports of flash floods in the midlands/warwickshire on the radio, I've opted to stay indoors today. Dave is somewhere on a campsite near London, for the last Maelstrom event of the year (and hopefully dry enough) so after spending the morning doing chores, I decided to spend the afternoon spinning.

While I was away on holiday, my spinning wheel went to stay with Chris from the Wednesday knitting group who proceeded to happily spin up every bit of fluff in her house. From her reports, I know the wheel not only spins, it spins very well, so any inadequacy in the spinning department is purely down to me and not the tools at hand.

Feeling full of optimism I got the wheel out of its corner, dusted it down and fetched some odds and ends of merino Kellie gave me when she did the spinning workshop a few months back. Next I sat practicing treadling for a good 20 minutes until I was sure I could keep the wheel moving smoothly for a long period of time without paying too much attention.

Then I had a go...

What can I say at this point, other than that while this attempt wasn't a disaster, I wouldn't call it a success either. The wheel definitely works. It takes up the fleece and spins it, but my technique is sadly lacking, with the main problem area being drafting.

I had suspected this might be the case before I started, but it soon became obvious that I couldn't draw fibres out of the merino top fast enough to satisfy the wheel. The fibre I was drafting was too thin and in my efforts to get enough twist into it by holding back before allowing the twist to travel into more fibre, meant it would snap.

Not waiting until I'd spun a good bit of twist into the fibre, meant the bobbin took up the yarn but it was woefully underspun. Examining it after each snapping incident as I pulled it back off the bobbin to try again, revealed it had no strength and would pull apart if put under tension because of the lack of twist... Which of course would mean it was prone to snapping.

This reminded me very much of my first few goes with the spindle actually - there the spun single couldn't support the weight of the spindle which would stretch out the underspun yarn until it dropped to the floor. The trick if it started to happen with the spindle was to spin the spindle which would put more twist into the spun thread and stop the problem in its tracks. Of course, putting enough twist in in the first place means this doesn't happen and so I haven't seen it in the spindle since those first few attempts... So perhaps I'm being overly critical of my first real go at using the wheel?

After an hour and a half, this was the sum total of yarn spun up and I wouldn't even guarantee that the single that's there is going to be any good if I tried to wind it off.

Either way, I think I need to find a supply of cheap but easily spun fibre to practice on before going any further.

Frustrated, I put the wheel away and got out of my spindle. I felt the need to spin, to prove to myself I could do it. I still use the park and draft method with the spindle and I haven't had time to practice in about four weeks, but I finished off the merino single I was working on previously...

And started spinning up the Grey Swaledale I picked up when I bought the spindle.

After struggling with the wheel, picking up the spindle again was much easier and the Grey Swaledale was very easy to spin. It's a course fibre with lots of guard hairs rather than just fluff so I was a bit doubtful but it really was no bother at all and in half an hour I spun up this...

Very nice and just the kind of confidence builder I needed.

(As always, click on pictures to see bigger versions...)

Small progress

Back in the land of work and academia, life is trundling slowly on as we gear up for the new term.  For me, that has mostly meant reading a lot of email, catching up on technical blogs and news aggregators and sadly neglecting all things crafty.

Not that I've stopped thinking about doing crafty things of course, but for the moment I'm giving myself a stern dose of realism as to how much I'm actually going to get done in the next few months.  At the moment, this is translating into refusing to allow myself to start any more projects until I get a few of my existing ones done.

Open project wise at the moment I have...

• manly charcoal socks
  
• preemie baby blanket
  
• cotton moss stitch bag
  
• crochet motif bag
  
• Victorian lace shawl

This of course does not include the hibernating sewing projects which have sat beside the sewing machine for two years.  There is also a crocheted rabbit sitting in bits somewhere waiting for me to get around to making it some legs...

My intention was to have two projects on the go. One lace and one other, with the second being more portable and requiring less concentration.  Hence why I had the cotton bag and lace projects from the list above.  Then of course I bought a book on beaded crochet which meant I had to have a go at something similar.  Jury service meant I had to have a project to take with me, so along came the baby blanket.  And camping meant I needed a small project to take with me, socks being the obvious choice.

This is the way that multiple projects start to pile up!

I am trying to get through some of these and last night, I took the crochet motif bag with me to the pub for the Coventry Knit-Wits meet up.

The bag itself was made up over a month ago now and I've been working on the embellishment side of things.  I'll write more when I've finished, but I decided to have a go at attaching crochet beaded motifs and here they are pinned and ready to be sewn on.

The motifs are not the easiest or quickest things to sew into place, their placement, shape and the number pins making it a slow job but after a couple of hours last night I am making progress.  Soon hopefully I can list this one as finished.

So some small progress there.

And this morning I survived a near disaster involving a large, oversized kitten who shall remain nameless and 2mm bamboo circular needles. It is indeed fortunate that I have eyes in the back of my head!

A day out at the fair

With our holiday almost over and my return to the office imminent (as in tomorrow - eeek!), Richard invited Dave and myself to join him at the Chatsworth Country Fair which is based at Chatsworth House. We'd never been before, but a quick look at the website seemed to imply it would be fun day out, so we were easily persuaded, so yesterday we set off for Derbyshire well before nine in the morning to begin our day out.

We swapped to Richard's 4x4 to head to the fair itself, which turned out to be a good thing given that we were directed to drive up some fairly steep fields to the slopes set aside as a parking area. We changed into walking boots and joined the crowds descending onto the fair proper.

The fair itself was one of those events with so much going on, that there was no way we could cover everything. There was a massive market of stalls, selling a multitude of wares that a countryside goer might need. There were hats, water proofs, boots, walking sticks and a plethora of tweed - just the sort of thing you could imagine farmers wives wearing, or being kitted out in to go hunting with guns and dogs. We saw chickens, toys, food, bed linen (that one surprised me), table linen, luxury wooden gazeebos, outside dining sets, garden furniture, petshops and even a huge wooden fort complete with telescope that Dave wanted for our garden. After a while, the shops all blurred into one but I did start my Christmas shopping while Dave bought some nuts and liquorice.

We didn't really sit to watch events in the main arena, but did look at some victorian steam driven machinery, peered at ancient cars and admired model wagons. We watched the fun fair rights in horror, particularly one which seemed to consist of a cage attached to two bungee cords. The riders were strapped into the cage and the bungee stretched, before they were flung into the air as if shot out of a giant catapult.

We watched some novice gun dogs doing retrieval work, saw the more experienced dogs being far more energetic doing the same with far less hints from their owners, watched a dog agility relay and agreed there was a bit of a dog theme going on here.

We lingered for a while watching the ferret racing...

This seemed to consist of putting your ferret into a flexible plastic tube and encouraging them to run to the other end and back again, with the first ferret home the winner. The ferrets thought this was great with several of them choosing to run back and forth inside the tube and never actually emerge at all. Great fun to watch and undoubtedly fun for the ferrets, which were very sweet.

We returned to the car at the end of the day for a cuppa while we waited for the car park to empty. This meant we got to watch the many hot air balloons take off and drift up the valley towards us.





There wasn't a huge amount of wind yesterday, with the weather remaining stubbornly muggy and mostly overcast, with the odd spot of strong sunshine to take us unawares. I'm not sure what constitutes good weather for ballooning, but the crews were having problems getting any real height, colliding with trees and desperately firing their burners to stop their balloon's crashing into the parked cars they were flying over.





It was quite a sight to see and certainly worth hanging around at the end of the fair for. I even managed to get some nice silhouetted shots of those few balloonists who made it up the hill. The sun was beginning to set by then and the crest of the hill made for some dramatic shots.





Finally we went home and it was a very exhausted me who ate some chips at Richard's before bundling Dave into the car shortly after 10pm for the long drive home. A long, exhausting day... But a good one.

Rain, rain and more rain

I'm back in the real world once more after eleven days of camping in a very wet South West Wales on the annual 'weeklong' Ascendancy LRP event. It rained every day, varying from light showers, to heavy persistent rain, to torrential downpour. We did get occasional breaks in the weather and even saw the sun every now and then, but mostly the theme of the week was rain.

This led to a reduction in biting insects, but saw our tents and cooking area become a shelter for wasps looking to get out of the rain, while we were inundated by invading slugs. It became standard practice to check for slugs before sitting down, putting anything down, picking anything up, climbing into bed, or eating anything. Slugs got into everything, included sealed storage boxes and zipped up tents!

One poor unfortunate who arrived for the last weekend hadn't learnt to keep his eyes open for invading slugs and discovered the need for caution the hard way when he made himself a nice cup of slug tea. Yuk!!!

We did consider warding food boxes with salt, but another camper tried it before us and discovered the salt doesn't keep the slugs out. They crawl over the salt and then explode in the least convenient of places.

Enough said methinks!

As usual we were well equipped and prepared for rain, with a shelter for cooking in and decent sized tents, so coped well enough. Lots of hot drinks and good food saw us through, and I'm happy to report that the newly installed dutch lacing on my bell tent worked well. While there was a reluctance to go outside, play continued, plot got out there and there was even stuff I'd written along with Richard out there for players to get involved with. It was fun, but tiring with the gloomy weather seeming to draw all of the oomph out of us.

I'm back home now, still in a sort of brain fog and trying to cope with a mountain of laundry. Everything I took with me is damp, although fortunately the rain held off (except for a few spots) while we took down the camp. The showers did arrive as we left site though, so we timed it just right I guess.

I collected the cats yesterday and was relieved to see that Charlie was OK. We started the 'weeklong' with an unexpected trip to the vets as the great lump got into a fight the night before. Dave witnessed it and said it was a serious set to which started when the other cat surprised Missy, forcing her to take refuge in a tree.

Charlie waded in in her defence and took a serious beating. He appeared to have been either kicked or bitten in the jaw, and had a bite on his right front leg as well as numerous scratches/bruises to the rest of his body. All of which meant he was feeling very sorry for himself by the next morning and needed antibiotics, pain relief and anti-inflamatories for the duration of his stay in the cattery.

Now the swelling has gone down, I can see definite puncture wounds along his jaw and he's still limping slightly on that front leg even after eleven days of rest, but other than that is in good spirits. In fact both cats are happy to be home and are being very attentive. It was very comforting to sit on the sofa last night, knitting a sock with a snoring cat draped over my lap.

My first dyed yarns

I'm back in the land of computers and real life after a brief sojourn to Wales where it rained a lot. Although we were camping, we were fine as we prepared as always... But the non-stop rain on Saturday plus the lack of light, made it a tiring day.

Yesterday the weather did break, thank goodness! So packing up wasn't too arduous, but I didn't get home until gone 10pm as Richard and I sat at services plotting for a long time. This means that today I am rather brain dead and not capable of saying much more than 'urgh'.

This is a brief post really, to show off the yarns I dyed up last weekend.

Firstly I have four 100 gram skeins of Blue Faced Leicester which were dip dyed using acid dyes. I had two dye baths, one containing blue dye and the other containing plum with a touch of pink which gave something which looks like this...
I very deliberately placed just the ends of the skeins in the dye bath's and then encouraged the dye to travel up the yarn until there was no white left. Because blue and red dyes take up at different rates this created some very interesting effects where the two dyes met and mean that only part of the yarn is truly pinky plum (which I'm calling berry) or blue. I like it.

Next up, the single skein of alpaca 4 ply, with a touch of nylon (10%) which I dyed using Kool-Aid type soft drinks.
As shown in a previous post, I used two dye baths one containing two packets of Kool-Aid in dark cherry and the other a Kool-Aid clone in grape. The colour here was far more subtle and the alpaca was much slower to take up the dye so I left it soaking while I had lunch. When I came back, the yarn still had some undyed bits which I left as they were. Very pretty and again, I like it.

And finally... Remember this?



Once dried and reskeined, it transformed into this...


This is a single skein of alpaca 4 ply (again with a touch of nylon) which I hand painted using the semi-exhausted dyes from the BFL above (it seemed a shame to just throw the excess away) and a fresh batch of turquoise. It took a long time to do and even after it had dried I wasn't sure I liked the result... until I reskeined it this morning, that is. Now, all I can say is wow!

I'm not sure what I'll do with it (or any of the others for that matter), but it sure came out purty.

(As always, click on images to see bigger versions...)

Frustrated crafter at large

Headed off to my regular knitting meeting last night where we had a sewing up workshop... After much frowning at some stocking stitch squares, knitted up in sock wool I've come to the conclusion sewing up knitted things really is not my forte.

It seems weird since I definitely can sew and give me woven fabric then I'm in my element, but ask me to sew up two tiny little knitted squares and I'm all fingers and thumbs. :(

I managed it for my one and only seamed knitted project (so far at least), so obviously I can apply needle and thread in the context of knitting but last night my mojo had definitely deserted me.

The wool I dyed up at the weekend has finally dried and I had planned to reskein the hand painted alpaca, but was defeated because my house is not big enough! I set two chairs up, one in the living room and one by the back door (in the kitchen) and discovered that I needed at least three more meters of house to stretch the yarn out properly. So... I have to wait until I am home during daylight hours and have nice weather before I can get the yarn back into a skein as this is going to have to be done in the garden.

I did have a quick poke around Ravelry and there seem to be several groups dedicated to dyeing which may be worth a looksee. I've not joined any of them as of yet, because if I do, I may want to do more dyeing which would be a problem since I haven't really got the time to do it at the moment. I'm not making much progress on knitting currently (despite my best efforts) and I haven't picked up my spindle in at least two weeks! :(

I did however come across this company (Pure Tinctoria) who sell natural dyes and may be worth a future look. I'm also wondering about using normal food dyes for dyeing purposes and wondering about making up dyes from raw ingredients. Now if only I had the hours to spare to do more than wonder...

Dyeing Day

Jury service turned out to be rather boring. I sat and waited, knitted a bit, read some, knitted a bit more, waited... And so on. The knitting endeared me to the catering staff who made me a mug of tea made with a real teabag rather than making me suffer machine tea, while everyone else pretty much gave me wide berth - after all, who knows what a woman wielding 4mm circulars might be capable of?

I've been dismissed now, so normality will resume for the next couple of days at least.

Looking back over the weekend, Sunday saw me heading to Birmingham to meet up with Heather, Helen and Iszy for a go at dyeing. I'd ordered some Blue Faced Leicester DK and some alpaca 4-ply from Fyberspates to play with, Helen was supplying Kool-Aid and similar beverages and Heather had the acid dyes plus all the expertise.

After some discussion, both Helen and I decided to have a go at hand painting one skein and dip dyeing the rest. That meant untying and re-skeining into a really big skein ready for painting, which led to us taking over Heather's garden and turning it into one huge cats cradle as we strung hundreds of meters of yarn up and down its length. This took some time, but that was OK as my remaining yarn was soaking in water to get it ready for dip dyeing.

The re-skeined and tied yarn was eventually transferred to a bucket of water as we moved onto having a go at dyeing using Kool-Aid. Here is my attempt in progress.

There are actually two packets of each soft drink in the bowls, but I only photographed one packet for illustration purposes. As you can see, this is Kool-Aid Black Cherry and a Kool-Aid-esq soft drink in 'Grape'. No idea what they taste like, but they dyed wool, wood and fingers alike.

After this, we picked up the pace a little and were alternating between mixing dyes, dipping wool, squidging wool, wrapping it in clingfilm, cooking it (poor Heather sat in the loft with her dyeing microwave for most of the afternoon) and then rinsing it as we peeled the clingfilm off.

We were so busy that I didn't get around to picking up the camera again until we were done.

Hand painting yarn was an interesting experience. After watching Helen wrestling her much bulkier skein I arranged my lighter 4-ply onto the table in a sort of giant wiggling zig-zag for painting. I used the dyes I had left over from dip dyeing plus a batch of turquoise and quite litterally painted the yarn. It was back breaking, time consuming work and I enlisted Iszy's help to get mine done as we were running out of time (and the weather was threatening to turn).

Here it is in the sink after cooking as I peeled off the cling film to give it a rinse.

Upon reflection, I think I prefer dip dyeing. It was far less precise, but the effects were quickly achieved and very dramatic.

Here are our collective efforts hanging up to dry in Heather's bathroom just before we bagged them up to take home. I'll post photo's of my finished skeins once they've dried.

Purple heatwave

It seems that summer has finally arrived (for a few days at least) with the past few days being very hot and humid. The weather forecast remains scary though, with the beebs animated one for today flashing lots of lightening in a dramatic fashion for tonight.

Due to the sudden heatwave, this weekend has been a fight to acquire oomph to do anything. Nonetheless, I headed into town on Saturday to start collecting supplies for next weekend when I'm hoping to join Helen, Heather and a few others for a spot of dyeing.

Reading Heather's extensive list of what we'll need to bring, I started off by buying cheap brushes and a bucket. Rubber gloves and a plastic dust sheet are still on my list, while I rescued newspapers from the recycling box. I ordered undyed yarn from Fyberspates at the beginning of last week so I'm keeping my fingers crossed my order shows up or there will be no dyeing for me!

Being on jury service this week means that I can't get the delivery sent to work, so I'm going to have to pick the parcel up from wherever Royal Mail takes it when they can't get you to answer the door. This used to be a sorting office in town, but I think it's been closed recently which means I have no idea where I'm going to have to go to fetch an undelivered parcel.

In other news, the eyelets are all set in the tent. I waited until early Saturday evening, when things cooled just a little to show Dave how to set an eyelet. He got started on the remaining eyelets early (ish) on Sunday morning (before the main heat of the day) and tells me they're all in. I haven't seen the finished eyelets myself yet, as he took the opportunity to douse the lawn in water and lawnfeed so everything became very damp for a short while.

By the time things had dried out again, it was too hot to think about hefting canvas about so I sat in the shade, playing with beads and mohair. I'm still at the experimental stage, but I'm pleased with what I've done so far. No photographs as my brain was melting by the time I was done (even sat in the shade) and I couldn't muster enough energy to fetch the camera.

Finally, I found this in the market on Saturday.

I've never seen a purple cauliflower before and was very taken with the vivid shade of the florets, so had to buy one to try it out. The purpleness was not very colourfast though, turning the water it was blanched in a nice violet sort of colour. This meant I was forewarned and not alarmed when the same purpleness leached into the cheese sauce the cauliflower was cooked in...

In fact I was rather amused by this turn of events, with both Dave and I agreeing that it was kind of cool to each purple cauliflower cheese. It was also very tasty, in a purpley, pink goodness sort of way.

Pink or blue?

Another week has flown by and I've been busy at work, trying to get anything essential done before the end of this week as my attendance at the office will be a bit hit and miss for the next month. I start jury service next week, so currently I have no idea where I'm going to be at any time. After that I have holidays booked, meaning that work have been warned that if worse comes to worse, they may not see me now until September!

As I look ahead to a weekend filled with more dodging of showers interspersed with whacking eyelets in all the while wincing at pain in my knee and arm, I'm also hoping to work on this...

This is a simple messenger bag that I cut the fabric for a couple of months ago and it's taken me until now to finish sewing up. As you can see, it's made of a nice (but maybe a little boring) heavy boiled navy wool which was probably originally intended for men's overcoats.

The wool itself is a woven fabric which has been boiled so that it's shrunk to become very dense and stable. It may also have been giving an additional waterproofing treatment, although I couldn't swear to it. This is the remains of a three meter piece of wool that I turned into a mantle for a friend a few years back and has been sitting unloved in my stash ever since.

No pattern here. I just measured out the pieces as I saw fit and made a strap which I lined to stop it from stretching. I lined the bag using some calendered cotton left over from a ball gown I made up, ooh probably four or five years ago now. I added a couple of pockets to the lining as I think they always come in handy for slipping your purse or mobile phone into, especially with bigger bags where such things have a tendency to get swallowed up.

I am pretty much making this bag up as I go along. No pattern and I'm not really experienced in the bag making department, so this is a big experiment. I'm also trying to make this bag up mostly from whatever is sitting in my stash.

And that includes Mohair.

My intention with this bag was always (from the day I originally cut the panels) to embellish it with crochet motifs. I picked up a copy of Easy Beaded Crochet during our recent trip to Lichfield and I was inspired by a bag in there which uses these lacy beaded motifs on a felted (crochet) bag.

I have seed beads sitting in my stash as well and so I thought, why not add similar motifs to this bag? I think it would certainly give it a little more oomph!

So the only question remains... Pink motifs or Blue motifs?

I need to make a decision before tomorrow when I shall start the search for matching buttons.

And finally...

We have a new addition to our household, a little friend that Dave brought back from Maelstrom with him.
Meet Rydl, in doll form.

Apparently this doll was knitted up by a fellow player at Maelstrom after Dave admired her 'sock' in progress earlier this year. The sock turned out to be a glove, but the lady was impressed by Dave's knowledge of knitting and so she made him this doll.

(As always, click on the pictures to see bigger versions.)

Eyelets (gromits) between showers

I spent this weekend mostly dodging showers.

British summertime was at its best in Coventry this weekend, with fantastic sunshine one minute followed by heavy downpour the next, clearing to sunny again within another 10 minutes.

Normally, I'm quite stoic about this - it is normal after all.

However, when you have a tent to fix this is very inconvenient, especially when there is a deadline approaching (i.e. I want to use the tent this summer) and you work fulltime, limiting the days you have available to work on said tent.

Saturday morning, I woke to sunshine so happily started preparing to work on my bell tent's door flap which I'm repairing by replacing the zip with eyelets. I waited for a few hours to make sure the ground was dry before hauling the tent out of the shed and laying it out on the lawn. Dave wasn't here (it being a Maelstrom weekend) so I was working on my own and with a currently dodgy arm/shoulder, that bag of canvas was painfully heavy, but I was determined.

Next up I gathered my tools, finding a suitable holepunch, a small piece of wood, a nylon hammer, a tiny anvil, my pointiest awl and of course a pencil, plus the required eyelets. I set a test eyelet in scrap of canvas, just to make sure I hadn't forgotten how, then marked out where the eyelets had to go on the top door flap. I also periodically instructed the cat (Charlie) to get off the canvas, which he wanted to help wrestle into submission.

Finally, happy that I had everything under control I nipped indoors for two minutes and was heading back outside when Missy came in to tell me it was raining.

Missy is a smart cat who holds a very high opinion of me. If the weather isn't to her liking she will come and find me, complaining about the situation bitterly and looking at me like I should now fix it. No matter how often I explain that I can't stop rain, she never stops acting like its a serious afront when I fail to do something about inclement weather.

But I digress. I rushed outside to find a heavy shower in progress and my previously dry canvas tent was getting wetter by the second. There followed a frantic two minutes as I bundled the tent up, carried it awkwardly into the shed before returning for the tools.

Some twenty minutes later, the rain stopped. I waited as the sun came out, waited some more for the ground to dry and then retrieved the tent from the shed, laying it out on the grass as I repeated the above... Until the heavens opened once more.

And so it went for the entire weekend.

After lugging that tent in and out of the shed more times than I care to admit, I finally set all of the eyelets for the top flap Sunday afternoon, finishing at 4:50pm. Each eyelet needs about ten to fifteen minutes of whacking with a hammer before they're in to my satisfaction. By that time, my knees were complaining, my hands were hurting and my arm was throbbing. And that's only half of them done!
So here we have seven eyelets, set 20cm (or 8 inches) apart, which seemed like a sensible distance to me. If you look carefully, you can see I've closed the original zip here and used the top flap to mark the position of the eyelets on the back flap. Which I will undoubtedly hope to do next weekend...

The cats were also spending the weekend dodging the showers, with the view from my back door alternating between this...

And this...
Around that point, Missy realised I was watching so started to mew happy girly squeaks while rolling over to beam at me, while Charlie watched in a bemused fashion.

I did try to get a picture of her the right way up, but when I stepped over her Missy got wind of the camera and her paperazzi issues kicked in and she ran off. Charlie posed for a moment or two though...
(Note the single orange hair lying on his forehead - now I wonder who put that there?)

And then got all excited by the attention, bouncing around the garden for a while before trying to wriggle under the patio.

(As always, click on the pictures to see bigger versions.)