Annis wrap

While travelling in Italy last year, mostly by train, I had some knitting with me.  I had done the lace and beads to replace the nupps in Annis, a free pattern from Ravelry, before leaving home.  The thread is some very fine handspun merino plied with even finer commercial cashmere.  The whole wrap took about 20gms leaving me with, oh, I don't know, maybe enough for 4 more wraps!  It looked so awful and small when I finished I threw it in a corner and forgot about it.  At Majacraft Camp I was admiring a friends wrap and she suggested I should start with Annis.  After sharing the story she encouraged me to block and I'm so pleased she did.  Its like warm nothingness around the neck.
Edit:  I did change the pattern slightly by adding garter stitch areas to the lace edge and working the crescent in garter stitch.

Unblocked

 

Unblocked



Blocking

Finito

Weaving, spinning, dyeing

Yet another quick post as I get ready for another weekend away, and, of course, its always a 3 day weekend and 2 more days getting over the fun.  Its not so long ago I'd have come home and got straight to the loom or wheel or sewing machine but not now.  Must be called age!

 Tui

 Above are the two tui blankets with 25 colours in the warp with a multi dyed weft.  The near one shows the darker edge which moves through to teals and turquoise as seen in the second one.  I've used a mohair boucle weft which reflects the light beautifully.  (Very hard to catch a moment without breeze to click the shutter.)

Then I was off to Majacraft Camp for a very fun weekend with lots of woolaholics.  I did two workshops with Pat Old extracting muka from flax, preparing it and then spinning it.  Its not so easy and quite time consuming.  I have to say that while I admire the end product of Pat's work I think I love wool and merino more.

 I did 2 workshops with Esther Rodgers, the first learning about and using Majacraft accessories and, yes I do covet a blending board and maybe combs.  And then we did wild spinning to weave with tails and beehives and all manor of things.  Esther is a wonderful tutor and she's working on a book so keep an eye out for it, it'll be worth having.

 Tired as I was on Monday, ie nearly falling asleep at the loom, I had blanket orders to work on.  Below is a double layer warp with the fold on the right hand side.

 And these multi coloured "toupes" are the weft.  I figured if I stood them up in the dye pot and the liquid came halfway up the ball it would work.  With a bit of squishing with tongs the dye went to the centre though a little paler then flip them over for the second colour and, of course, there is a third where the dyes meet.  Blankets are off the loom and the warps and wefts dyed ready for the next lot.

 The silk in this silk/merino skein came from Beautiful Silks in Melbourne and was spun a month or two ago but I didn't know what to ply it with or should it be Navajo plied.  I needed the bobbin last weekend so plied it with black merino TEX 74/2.  I had thought to use it for weft for a scarf or wrap (depending on metreage) but its so gorgeous maybe it should be a knitted lace wrap. 

That's all this week.  Tomorrow morning at 5am I'll be on the road for Coopers Beach up north for Professional Weavers Seminar and the opening of Agnes and Stacey's exhibition "Nature in the Making" www.facebook.com/natureinthemaking

Creative Fibre versus commercial enterprise

I've been a member of Creative Fibre for nearly 30 years and this Society has a tradition of sharing information, helping and encouraging.  I know when I first joined Whangamata club way back 'whenever' I received heaps of help and encouragement.  Because I live in a reasonably isolated area I tend to not go to club meetings as it takes so much time travelling which is time away from my production so I like to help whenever I can.  But, at what point does Creative Fibre "help" become releasing sensitive commercial information?  Where do you draw the line in the overlap?

I wrote the above sometime ago with reference to another incident but then realised I'd done much the same.  The line does become very blurred.

A while ago the lovely Jessicah showed some gorgeous yarn she had spun and it seemed to be just the spinning method I needed for a project I had in mind.  I wrote to her inquiring but also said I understood if she felt this was commercially sensitive as she teaches spinning.  She kindly gave me the method (rather more organised than what we had learnt at Majacraft camp) and I adapted it to suit my project.

I was combining two variegated slivers of merino, one from Awakeri Woolcraft and one from Tracey White (Inspired Fibres) and a variegated sliver of silk dyed by Jessicah.  Having put all three through the drum carder with the silk sandwiched in the middle I took each batt off and split it vertically down the middle and put each of them back through the carder so I now had two matching batts partly mixed which I kept in order in seperate boxes.  I had parted the dominant sliver at colour breaks as much as possible.  It spun beautifully and pretty much kept to tone on tone with a little overlap when plied; just what I wanted.

Now to find time to knit it!