Dreaming Spirals

Yes, it’s finished!  It knit up really quickly once I got going.  I nearly ran out of dyed wool though - it was good that I dyed the two extra skeins last week because I needed them.  This is all that was left of the dyed wool (apart from the Kool Aid dyed stuff and about 8 oz of undyed which I’ve earmarked for indigo or henna or something that doesn’t need a mordant).    I bought 2lbs of it altogether so the bag is pretty heavy!

The brown roving is the one I dyed with St Johns Wort (and copper mordant).  The thinner wool is what the skeins were tied up with!

Here is the finished bag before felting:

I decided to make the handles as in the French Market bag in Knitty rather than a shoulder strap which was what the pattern I used called for.  I was glad I did because I think it looks better that way.

Here is the finished bag!  I ended up washing it at 60 and then at 90 (thanks, Helen!) on a short cycle each time, then I spun it contrary to the pattern instructions because I didn’t want to wait DAYS for it to dry out and I finished it off for 5 minutes or so in the dryer to fluff it up a bit. 

I like the way the colours have changed with the felting.  The browns look much more greenish and the reds stand out nicely.

This is the other side of the bag.  And underneath:

And a close up!

At present it is sitting on the floor stuffed with towels to give it a nice rounded shape!

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Here is the onion skin-dyed yarn drying on the line.  Yummy colour, isn’t it?

Here it is dried and ready to use:

The colour is actually closer to the top picture.

And here is some more yarn being brought to a simmer - this has a mishmash of St Johns wort, the remains of the onion skin dyebath and a couple of nettle teabags which I chucked in for good measure!  Talk about unscientific… The yarn has been mordanted with copper.

It actually turned out a mid brown colour and is drying upstairs as I type.  Photo later.

Here is the half knitted to-be-felted bag.  I have still got about 30 rows to do and the yarn is disappearing at an alarming rate!

You will notice I have tweaked the blog colour a bit and made a few changes and additions to the sidebar.  If you find it isn’t behaving itself for you, do let me know.

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The house smells of onions at the moment because I’m busy boiling onion skins so I can overdye one of the skeins I did last time.  Meanwhile, I have been busy knitting my bag!  So far I have done the base and about 10 rows of the main bit - about 50 more rows to go!  But it knits up very quickly as I’m doing it on 10mm needles.  I am going to felt it in the washing machine afterwards - just hope I can get that bit right because the instructions say a top loading machine which you can keep stopping and checking.   My machine is a front loader which you have to programme and it throws a wobbly if you try and stop it in the middle.  So next week if I’m mopping up water and complaining about broken washing machines, you’ll know this is the culprit!

No photos of the half completed bag yet, but here, as promised are some of my fabric stash sorted by value (my photography seems to lag behind my blog posts at the moment…. 

The darkest two:

The medium two (actually looking at that photo I must move a few more around!:

And the lightest two:

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I had a nice day out on Saturday.  DS1 and 3 were camping so I went to the Royal Welsh Showground at Builth Wells for Wonderwool Wales.

I went by train on the Heart of Wales line, which is probably the most picturesque rail journey in Wales, winding its way through from Shropshire to Swansea.  At the railway station I got on, you had to hail the driver for him to stop the train, like getting on a bus! 

The show was fun - it was part of the Smallholders’ show but I mostly stayed in the Wonderwool area.  There were lots of yummy fibres and yarns, and lots of local producers and processors of the fibres.  And craftspeople from all over the UK. 

There were also animals there!  Here are a couple of alpacas which I fell in love with!

And lots of different sorts of British sheep, which I found fascinating because up to now I thought sheep were sheep and didn’t realise they were so different and individual.

These are Ryeland sheep.  They have such sweet faces.   A lady there told me that apparently their wool doesn’t felt, which makes it useful if you don’t want it to!

This is the Wensleydale longwool - its wool was very soft!

This is the Jacobs sheep.  There were lots of other coloured sheep there with different variations of colours between black, grey, browns as well as whites.  I wished at this point that I wasn’t travelling on the train because it precluded me buying lots of fibre but I did buy a drop spinning kit from Hedgehog Equipment who are based near Abergavenny which isn’t that far from Newport.  I picked up lots of leaflets with links to websites so I can find them again readily if I take to it!

There were also angora goats in another of the sheds.  At least, I hope they are angora goats - I get very confused with the non-wool fibres…

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If you leave a comment in future, you will notice that it now gives you the option to subscribe to the comments for that particular entry, which means that you can follow any discussion or any reply to your comment in the future. I found this plugin and decided that in future I will reply to any comments in the comments rather than in private emails (if appropriate), which will hopefully generate more discussion and interaction. One of the things I find difficult when I leave comments on people’s blogs is remembering to go back and check for replies so this seems to be an ideal solution, for my own blog at least. What do you think?

If you have a Wordpress blog and fancy putting the plugin on to your blog, you can find it on this page.

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Well, I successfully upgraded. Now all I have to do is find out how to put the banner image back and a few other minor (I hope!) details. And get used to the new blog admin. Bear with me!

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In the next day or two (time and kids permitting) I hope to upgrade my version of Wordpress so I can use a particular plugin (and to make it more up to date). So if there are any glitches, please bear with me! Normal service will be resumed asap etc etc…. I’ve just done all the backups so I can rescue things if it all goes awry but it’s getting too late now to do the actual download.

DS3 has his school swimming gala tomorrow morning so it won’t be then! He and DS1 are going camping with the Scouts (it is the centenary year of the founding of the Scouting Movement and 800 Newport scouts are converging on a field a few miles away… locals beware!). So I’ve been busy preparing his luggage for storms, gales and all sorts over the last few days. Not much time for anything else, alas. Baking some chocolate brownies for the scouts and a birthday cake for DH’s 50th birthday has taken up any surplus time and energy (not much of the latter these days, alas…). And reading emails of course. I’ll leave the promised photos of my value-organised stash till after the upgrade, having done a nice backup.

DS2 has ordered a new graphics card for the main computer so if that arrives he will be nagging me to install it… I’ve never done any taking-covers-off of that particular computer … I do like poking round the innards of computers. I missed my vocation. He wants to play superduper games with extra intricate graphics and the present card is too slow. Or something like that.

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Please help by adding this poster to your blog.   Updates can be seen on the BBC website.

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