Plug and Play Pembrokeshire

So the day finally came for the Plug and Play marketplace in Pembrokeshire, and our first experience selling yarn face to face, and what a lovely day it was!

Mark got dressed in all his best "knitted Viking" finery:

Young Mark is sporting a Wollmeise tunic, the Urban Aran cardigan
and Gower Wool fingerless gloves

 

I couldn't decide which shawls and sweaters to wear for both the freezing outdoors and potentially warmer indoors so just threw a whole selection in the car. I think I changed neckwear 3 times along the way.

After a swift drive and a fruitless search for an open tea room on the way, we arrived early at the Beggars Reach Hotel and were warmly welcomed by Amy and Brenda who made sure that we were swiftly fed and watered. We were also introduced to our fellow vendor - the fantastic Caerthan from Triskelion Yarns (whose sweater I intend to shamelessly copy as soon as I can get my hands on some more Lopi )

                      

Once the attendees where secured at the lunch table next door, we set up in the lovely bright room provided and were told not to tease the ladies as we carried our wares past the windows. After a valiant effort from Amy to keep the frenzied and clearly yarn-starved crowd at bay, the attendees were finally allowed in and an incredible blur of yarn and colours and oohs and aahs followed. It was such a joy to be selling to the converted, so different from the crafts markets I normally attend where you might get a confused look at most. I will be keenly following the progress of all my little yarns to fully grown projects from now on, I can't wait to see what these talented ladies will make of them! (and if you are one of these talented people, feel free to send me pictures and I will post them up)

The Gower Wool display - all the undyed
and the fibre are all gone!

All the new Lovely Linen colours

 

Amy Singer from Knitty with one of
her ill-gotten gains....I mean purchases:
a bright Periwinkle Linen Scarf.

We finished this perfect day by stopping off on the Gower to drop in unannounced on family and friends, ending the evening with an impromptu Sunday dinner for 5 complete with 4 kinds of roast veg, cooked, to my astonishment, in Marks mothers motorhome!

 

 

 

 

 



 





 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

There's hope!

After yet another unseasonably cold snap last week, I was amazed to come down to our allotment and find that things have actually been growing! They're only little, but they are oh so pretty...




 

tiny garlic shoots

red currant



black currant that we inherited with the plot

Some of you might notice that the shop is currently closed - many many apologies for this: I have had the great honour to be invited as one of only two sellers at the Plug and Play retreat in Pembrokeshire this weekend and am frantically skeining, weighing and labelling in preparation!
Normal service will resume on Monday the 25th.

News from the shop

Last year - the first time we produced our Gower wool - we sold out of it by February and had to sit around and wait for the sheep to be ready to shear again and with the terrible year that it was, didn't have any more supply until October. Learning from that mistake, I asked for an extra sack of fleece to keep for spinning later in the year and treasured it in our garage until the current stock started running low.
 Now, a 20 kilo sack of raw sheeps fleece is not a small thing. It stands about waist high and pongs of lanolin. The sacks from the Natural Fibre Company who spin our wool are also bright white. Nonetheless, the courier company charged with transporting this gigantic, white sack have somehow utterly and completely managed to lose it. They've looked for weeks up and down depots in the country but have now decided that the sack is, in fact, gone.
We've been reinbursed for the value of the fleeces of course, but sadly, it still means no more Gower Wool until after summer shearing. There are still a good few hanks in both dyed and undyed colours available but that really is it for now!

So I have been thrown into dyeing my other bases for now, and with spring hopefully looming, I have prepared a few fresh and springy colours in the lovely Lithuanian linen.
It is a heavy lace to light fingering weight and this year we are doing it in the smaller 50gr hanks to allow you to mix and match the colours.
As linen is very absorbent, it takes the dye very quickly and thoroughly, making for an almost solid colour with only minor shifts expected of a hand dyed product.

For those not used to knitting with linen, it may appear stiff and stringy att first, but it softens in your hands as you work with it and will continue to soften for the many years that you wear it. Fantastically hard wearing, once blocked it also holds lace patterns beautifully without curling back up on itself and drapes very well.

I will be adding many more colours as soon as I dye them, as well as long long scarves made from the commercially dyed version of this same yarn. Let's just hope it will be warm enough for these lighter knits soon!

The really quite fantastic chair

A friend and I took a rather long drive to a car boot sale yesterday morning. It wasn't terribly busy or interesting, unfortunately, probably due to the weather still being a bit bleak and cold, but I found a couple little bits, a flower pot, some  cute salt shakers, a check shirt, but nothing so exciting it made it worth the long drive....until we spotted this lovely, well-kept arm chair. It was exactly the kind of thing that Mark and I had discussed putting in his little library nook in the livingroom - it could do with a chair but the space is not very deep so it couldn't be anything big and upholstered.

I knew from looking at it that it was most likely an Ercol - a wonderful longstanding british make that I seem to be finding a lot since moving to Wales, and it certainly was the kind of mid-century style that I love. I also knew that the stall was one of those proffesional ones with only a few big pieces on a tarpaulin, so they would know what they were selling and surely be priced thereafter. But we asked, just in case. We made the lady repeat what she said as we didn't quite believe our ears. Fifteen pounds. Fifteen teensy pounds for that beautiful Ercol chair and it was going to be all mine!

 

So here it is, being put through rigorous quality testing in situ:

 And here is something you really don't see every day: my other half, getting animated about fabric choices for what is apparently now his chair. This mostly only happens when he is trying to prevent me from bringing more "bile green patterened things" into our decor, and he seems to have plumped for a patchwork of indigo fabrics with a Japanese sashiko back cushion, and decided to keep the dark wood stain as it is - our usual default setting is to strip everything back to bare wood, but I guess keeping it dark gives it a certainly manly library charm.

 

 

 

      

 

See my vest, see my vest...

A couple of years ago, my good friend brought me a gigantic, thick sweater that had belonged to her father for almost 40 years but that he had had to admit was now far too big for him. She thought that "maybe I could use the yarn for something".
The yarn turned out to be chunky and hand spun, and really soft for something so old! It was made in Australia but we're still not completely sure what fibre it is. It is naturally dark brown, so feels too soft to be black sheep of some kind. My friend thought there might have been mention of alpacas.
It quickly earned the name Gorilla Sweater....every time I wear it I get the glorious but awful Mr Burns song in my head

 As for the sweater itself, I reknitted it top-down to maximise what yarn I had. I seem to have made it far too wide as I've had to repeatedly move the buttons further and further to the side, which is a shame as I could have used that yarn to make proper full length sleeves, but I don't think the yarn can handle another unpicking - it's quite hairy and involved a lot of yanking. Maybe now that I ve learned to spin I might spin up something a bit similar and extend the sleeves - I tried to consider it as a sort of body warmer, but to be honest, when it's cold enough to wear gorilla, it's cold enough for full length sleeves....

A little love in the air

There must have been a little love in the air when I was trying out a new base yarn over the weekend, as what came out of the pot were these three dramatic Valentines inspired colours.

The yarn is 100% Superwash Merino Wool in a single ply fingering weight, perfect for striking lacy projects. It is dyed in a particular way to leave the core of the yarn white, creating a mottled effect.

100gr skeins with 366meters / 400yards to a skein.

Daybreak the 59th

aka Handspun Daybreak

Pattern: Daybreak by Stephen West

Yarn: 200gr hand spun Bluefaced Leicester fibre, hand dyed in light to dark gradient blue and yellow

This was one of my very first spinning efforts, and dyeing it too, for that matter. I think the colours came out a little too bright - the blue should have been more stormy grey and the yellow only goes dark golden right at the very end, but it was lovely to knit and oddly enough, it looks better on than it does when you just look at it. Maybe it's the contrast with skin tones or something. It's also very lovely and soft.

Having finished that, I've picked up another stripey number that I started on late last year. 

It is inspired by this kit from french shop Elle Tricote:

              Although the original looks fantastic in the Noro yarn, I had some lovely swedish yarn waiting to be made into something, and I thought the pattern would look nice in a more monochrome colour way. I also thought that the sweater would be more flattering for me with the chevrons pointing downwards. I couldn't find the pattern I had in mind anywhere, but with a little help from the magic of ravelry forums, we figured out how to transform a cardigan pattern into a pullover.

                    

What I've got here is a gigantic knit in the round square. Once the points reach my required length for the arms, I will add small triangles in strategic places and they will somehow form sides and seperate sleeves. Don't ask me how, but I'll keep you posted!