The countdown has begun!

At 2100 tonight a hush will descend across the land as knitters, crocheters and fibre crafters all across the world pick up their tools of choice and jump into a frenzy of project commencement... oh and apparently the telly should be pretty good too, some sporting event or something starts :)

Well I might not quite have won my maillot jaune during the Tour de Fleece (life won on two days that weren't the rest days, though given I spun on both of those I kind of did spin the right number of days?!?!) but I did achieve my first goal of finishing spinning the silk I need to knit Tethys.

I've got two of the skeins caked up and ready go. A quick note on which, I decided against using the ball winder for these as they are just so slippery. My winder is in fairness a cheap one, with a tendancy for the yarn guide to collapse resulting in the yarn getting caught in the mechanism. Not so bad when it is commercial yarn, or even hardy handspan sock yarn. My nice soft silk though, not on your life was I going to risk that!


In the spirit of both preparation and procrastination I also decided that this really did need a project bag of its own too. I'm going to be dragging this everywhere I go for the next two weeks and it is a pale colour so it needed to go in something, and I'm enjoying making the bags at the moment. This though was going to rapidly outgrow any of my little sock bags. A new plan was needed.

I don't think I've mentioned it, but a month or so ago I bought a Namaste Monroe bag for work... and now general life! It is perfect! The front zip pocket holds my valuables (iPad, phone, purse) while the back non-zip pocket has everything else in it (pencil case, notebooks, hand gel... you get the picture). This leaves me the middle half height pocket for whatever projects I'm schlepping around that week. Normally I have a spindle and a set of socks in there, in bags of course, and I tend to throw the iPod in too as it is zipped up but still really easy for me to get to. The obvious answer to my bag problem therefore was to make the largest bag I could, whilst still enabling it to fit in the Monroe.

As you can see it is a bit of a wierd size when it is on its own, about 37cm long, 14cm tall and 9cm deep. This though fits that centre pocket of the Monroe perfectly when I have all my other stuff in it too. As you can see from the next picture, this also perfectly fits full cakes of yarn.

The cakes on their own fill maybe 2/3 of the height, so I've still got plenty of space on top of them to put in the WIP itself when I get started. Given it was daft o'clock when I got this finished last night I stopped when I finished the seams. I kind of feel that I want to go back and put some extra pockets on the inside of the bag though. Initial thoughts are a longish pocket on one side to hold a folded pattern out of the way, maybe some tip sized ones on the opposite side so I can have a couple of different ones with me, for those patterns that change part way through, and maybe some little bar type sections that I could hang some stitch markers on. I'll have to see how I get on though before making any decisions.

In other crafting news, I still need to ball up some the "This one's Ewenique" Footsie I bought from Yarnscape two separate 50g cakes. That will be my tiny carry project for the Games and will hopefully live in the pyramid bag. I'm also heading off to my parents for a weekend at some point soon and would really like to have made a spindle project bag for the top whorl that Dad made me. It'll probably be very similar to the box bags, though a little smaller in height and depth, with a carry handle but also a loop for a carribina to clip to. That way I can clip the bag to my trousers etc pull the zip down a little and use it as a fibre storage while spinning. I get the feeling I should have joined Team Hopelessly Overcommitted rather than Team Yarnscape for this one!

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Useful side effects...

Of course the positive side effect of all this new sewing is a) a whole bunch of rather nice scraps and b) a good excuse to buy fat quarters, and who doesn't need more of those in their life? :)

I am though, at heart, a knitter. So what's a knitter to do with all this fabric? Make project bags of course :D

My first was the one on the right made from two fat quarters, some very thin batting and a zip. Total cost, about £5. Not the cheapest thing in the world but it is perfectly customised to me. It fits one full 100g cake of yarn with space for the inevitable pair of socks, stitch markers and an A4 pattern folded in quarters. I tend to magic loop but it also fits a set of 15cm DPNs if needed. Just inside at the zip end are a set of loops that I'll eventually be able to hang crochet style markers on. What really gives this one it's strength though is the quilting. I'm most way through quilting all around the coastline of the pattern and have been amazed the difference it has made.

The second bag was almost completely made from scraps. The only 'new' materials are the zip and again the batting. I've not quilted this one as it's pretty robust in its own right, especially as the inner is a smidge too large. Personally I've always doubted the use of the pyramid bags as they seem to waste a lot of space. This one was constrained by the size of my scraps but I think it should prove useful for 50g cakes of sock yarn, for those Cookie A patterns where each sock is a mirror of the other :)

 

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And now for something completely different!

A while back I (think I) blogged about spending a very crafty weekend with my little sister, incorporating spinning, hand-piecing and beading into about 48hrs of crafty fun. Well it seems that it has had a slightly longer term impact than originally anticipated, namely I seem to have added quilting to my list of burgeoning skills.

With the imminent birth of a good friend of my DH's first child I oddly thought it would be faster and cheaper to stitch a baby blanket than to knit something. Wrong on both accounts but I am considerably less worried about the finished article being trashed in the wash so it is still a win in my book. I didn't think this was bad for a first attempt, took probably about as long in total to make as a good sized baby cardigan type thing, and probably cost in the region of £30-40 by the time it was finished.

Now the mistake I made the second time round was to utterly underestimate the cost of these things! The one above had used a lot of fat quarters for the tiny squares, and it turns out that the yellow polka dot which it is backed in is one of the cheaper fabrics that this store carries. Cue one heck of a shock when buying stuff for a second blanket that a) couldn't be done in FQs and b) featured very large amounts of the 'designer' fabrics. I almost fell over when I found out what I'd just asked to be cut. PUBLIC SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT: check the cost before they start cutting!!!!! Anyway life being what it is, I've now been pulled off the expensive blanket project (which if I'm honest has yet to make it to the cutting stage... baby is much more distantly related, someone I get on with at work but don't have that much to do with etc) by my darling DH dropping into conversation that another set of good friends are moving back to the UK from places hot and sunny, and wouldn't it be nice to give their newborn a blanket to help her acclimatise to the rather cooler climes of the UK. Sure I agreed, when are they due back? Two weeks.......

Oh heck!

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What is a girl to craft?

I need to get this finished for friends of ours who have just had a little girl...

I want to get these finished as they're soooo close to done, and my feet want new socks :)

I should be spinning this for the Tour...

That sleep stuff is optional right? :D

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Tour de Fleece

This year (my first) I'm taking part as a member of Team Yarnscape. For those of you unfamiliar with this odd event the concept is simple, you spin every day that the Tour de France rides, attempting along the way to set yourself particular goals. Now in the run up to the start I had all sorts of wonderful ideas but very quickly realised that with life messing me about the way it is at the moment, that in a lot of ways just spinning every day was going to be a whole challenge in itself! That said in the first week I've got quite a lot done...

 

All three of these mini-skiens have been spun and plied during the Tour, I have about another half bobbin of the Tethys silk brick (one of my original goals) spun up and the other day I started messing about with some silk caps I'd bought at Woolfest.

Agh those caps! Now I've spun some samples of hankies before, learning the technique of splitting off a hankie, or more realistically two, before putting a hole in the middle and essentially pre-drafting the heck out of them. I don't know what it is with these caps but I'm damned if I can get only one or two separated at a time, which is making the drafting an utter nightmare. Put it this way, I now have matching blisters on the first knuckle of both my index fingers :( The yarn does look pretty though so pictures will shortly follow.

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Woolfest

Wow was that ever a wet weekend!!!!

Woolfest 2011 was the first fibre festival I'd ever attended, taking my Mum on a magical mystery tour involving much fluff and night in the Cockermouth YHA. 2012 though was a solo affair, partially due to things being utterly up in the air at work and the related last minute planning. Luckily for me, the latter included re-waterproofing my tent!

Well the drive up to Cheshire on Thursday was surprisingly dry, and I got to my parents a little before 2300. All thoughts of an early night quickly disappeared though as I don't see them that often and took the chance to have a good catchup. Managed to get a pretty early start though (fuelled by a very nice cooked breakfast that's to Dad) and promptly it started to rain. Hmm rain. That word really does fail to describe the sheer amount of water falling from the sky that weekend. The drive itself was pretty uneventful until about 10 miles from Cockermouth an idiot driving in front of me managed to kick up a huge pile of stones etc (breaks, accelerator, breaks, accelerator in quick succession on a semi-flooded road is the fast way to annoy those behind you!) promptly cracking my windscreen. Not impressed. Anyway I made it, got parked and started sniffing the wool fumes :)

The event itself was to me a little of a let down. That though is through no fault of the organisers. Last year it had been my first festival, I was a brand new spinner and I was deep in the "must learn all the things" phase :). This year I had a list, I know what I enjoy spinning and to be honest was just being a whole lot more sensible on the money front.

It was good fun though. Dinner wasn't bad and the spin in was lovely. Driving back to the campsite was erm interesting(!) and by the next morning I think I was the only camper on the site not washed out (see my remarks about the re-waterproofing!). For all the jokes the previous day I think what saved me was that I was in an ultralight tent. Was it small, erm yes! but that seemed to a) allow me to use the car to shelter it to an extent and b) the rest of the rain/wind just went straight over it. What I really could have done without though was breaking down on the way home the next day and having a three hour wait to be rescued. Ho hum an eventful weekend in more ways than one!

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