Hello! Yes, back again after a much longer break than I had planned. Since I last blogged I had to go to Canada for a work trip (Nova Scotia, just beautiful). Now this was to attend a Big Grown Up Conference Full of Important People. Fortunately, they are also rather nice and lovely. Most importantly, the outgoing president of the society organising the conference has recently taken up spinning and weaving. She is a good friend and utterly spoiled me by gifting me these four beautiful skeins of yarn that she had spun.
Spinning fascinates me – I would love to learn how to do it but I am a bit scared on two counts:
- I will be rubbish at it and this will break my heart
- I will be good at it, I will enjoy it, and develop a new fibre-related addiction
Secretly I have a hankering after a beautiful wooden spinning wheel but at the moment I am going to resist.
I had promised myself a drop spindle to play with when I went to Fibre East at the end of July. However, I made a bit of a boo boo. This year we have been a bit restricted re when we could get away as a family and after much nagging we finally agreed a week we could both do and a location and we booked it quickly as the date was only two weeks away. After we had booked I realised it clashed with the long planned trip to Fibre East with two friends. I have to confess to being more than a little bit gutted at this point. I love that show and this year there were dyers I really wanted to meet, and whose yarns I was keen to see close up. I had set aside a little budget for a yarn splurge. And so it was I found myself on Etsy in the car on the drive to Cornwall, picking some very pretty yarns to compensate myself. One purchase was waiting for me when I got back home. The beauties pictured below are by All Wool That Ends Wool – she dyed for my first show and the intensity of colour she achieves in her yarn is very impressive. Anyway, I love these colourways and even though I have enough sock yarn to last me a couple of years (!) I succumbed. I’m not even sorry. I mean, just look at them. The fact that they barely fit in my box of sock yarn is not something I am going to dwell on….
The last minute nature of the holiday also saw me sitting up the night before we left madly caking yarn ready for some holiday knitting. At the Canadian conference I promised two of my former colleagues and another friend there that I would knit them socks, as none of them had ever experienced the sheer delight of having a warm bath and then popping handmade sock on your toes when your feet are tired. There is nothing quite like it. So I managed to get two sets of socks made while I was away, between trips to the beach, Tintagel, Eden Project and other pretty wonderful places. The third set of socks is on the needles now. As ever, I want to keep all the socks, but this time I really do want to keep these – the first ones are on Electric Boogaloo yarn by Lollipop Guild Yarns, and the second is on Jimi by Jo.Knit.Sew. Jimi is a yarn I had in my stash for a long time, and as it has a little bit of sparkle in it. They twinkle in the light and are so pretty in real life.
This week I am attempting to work from home with my small, which means logging into work email after she has gone to bed and pretty much working nocturnally. Said small has agreed to go to bed an hour earlier than normal so that I am not completely tired by the time I start the night shift. We will see how this works out, but she seems very committed to it at this point! What I have been able to do, however, it get the signup form for my very first (and currently one-off) yarn box, nicknamed the Brain Box (well, why not?). I am very, very excited by this as it gives me the excuse to commission some new yarn from my favourite indie dyers plus also go shopping for brain-related extras. I am really pleased with some of the ones I have sourced. If you would like to sign up, the link to the form is here.
I am hoping to pick up the pace with the blogging this month if I can so watch this space!
The Knackered Psycho 