Wednesday 7th April

Its amazing how fast the time seems to pass me by.  I have spent the afternoon dyeing up some hanks of yarn that I purchased for weaving.  Five 100g hanks of silk and alpaca in laceweight and five 100g hanks of laceweight bluefaced leicester yarn are now dyed and drying out.  Photographs to follow when dry.  These will be used in future projects.

On the spinning front, some hand dyed merino rovings in a burgundy colour are being spun up on the Kromski Minstrel at present and the hand knitted scarflette in Jade mohair and silk is almost finished.  The Easter holidays are here at the moment and the girls are home from school so its not so easy to concentrate on more complicated projects when my bottom hardly seems to touch the sofa for more than five minutes at a time!

The first bobbin of merino roving spun up

Showing as slightly lighter than the original colour, the merino roving waiting to be spun.

I have just purchased a polystyrene bust to display my handmade items on for photographs.  I felt this would look better than the dining chair! This has been christened Doris! 

On the loom this week is a plain weave scarf using a silk and wool warp hand dyed in multiple colours and the weft is a fine two ply lambswool yarn, undyed from Texere yarns.  The lambswool is very soft and I wanted something neutral to show off the colours in the warp yarn.  Plain weave is very easy, just being a straight four shaft draft, one thread in each shaft, one to four repeated across all the threads.  I used 96 ends and with plain weave you dont need to set up selvedges.  For those of you who are not familiar with weaving selvedges are the edge threads that form the neat side of the weaving.  There are several ways to do this but mostly I use two threads threaded in each of the first two heddles, so four threads on each end in all.

Close up of the plain weave scarf with multicoloured hand dyed silk and wool warp and two ply lambswool warp.  I like the way the colours are showing up through the lambswool.

This picture shows the warp and the fine lambswool weft on the shuttle.

More soon, have a good week.