Jubilee Cakes

For a Jubilee Bring & Share lunch today. Yum. 

Mar Menor

My visit to Wonderwool Wales resulted in meeting the lovely Anniken Allis on her stand, and buying the Mar Menor Shawlette pattern after asking advice on a first beaded shawl to knit. I loved the one she had on display, and on realising it was knitted in Araucania Botany Lace, and that I had recently purchased a skein of said yarn in York, I decided that Mar Menor was the pattern to knit with the wool I had. The beads simply begged to be genuine amethyst and green lace agate, so that's what happened. 

It didn't take long to knit, and the decorative stitches were fun and so pretty. The beads went on easily enough, and I love the whole effect.

Find more Finished Objects here on FO Friday

Wonderwool Wales 2012

My goodies from Wonderwool Wales yesterday!

1. Hooking kit for me to do with my daughter.
2. THE bag.
3. Yarn Addict pretty shawl pattern.
4. 3 skeins of cobweb mohair from Artisan Yarns, to make the Wray cardigan
5. Plaited fluff from Krafty Koala for spinning.
6. Sparkleduck’s silk/merino 4 ply.
7. Natural Dye Studio’s silk 4 ply.
8. McAnarak buttons
9. Willo Alpacas orange fluff to spin
10. WhyNot alpaca 4ply.
11. HiyaHiya circular
12. Betty the alpaca (the brown one. I already had Al. From WhyNot Alpacas).
13. Alpaca (Valerie) fluff from Pembrokeshire Alpacas.
14. The mystery package in the corner is Bigwig angora/merino 4ply (2 balls).  

I had a wonderful time even though it was soooo cold. 
I tried out a new route (having tried driving previously, then train to Builth Wells from Wolverhampton, which only gave me 3.5 hours at the show. This time, it was train from Wton to Newtown, then bus to Builth Wells. Total journey there = 3 hours 10 mins. It meant I had 6 hours at the show which was great. On a warmer day I'd have sat and knitted for a while, but it was too cold for that. 
I seemed to attract abandoned men during the day. One lovely gentleman was telling me about his family and his wife's crochet. Another one was telling me about his rare breed sheep, chickens, and the alpacas he wanted to buy. 


I felt it essential to partake of a Scotch egg from the Scotch egg man, after all the hype. I selected a 'Valentino', which contained, in addition to the expected egg and pork sausage meat, cranberries. Very tasty. I'll dine there next year too.


It was great to meet in person sellers of goodies I've enjoyed over the last year, and people I've 'met' through Ravelry, blogs etc. It was lovely to meet Lydia (Shearer's Girl) and Amanda from the Natural Dye Studio. 


Although I'd been trying to think of terrible things to do or say to Mr EasyKnitter of Easyknits for lying to me repeatedly over my order from him (yes it was he of whom I spoke in this previous blog post), I satisfied myself by standing in front of his stall and thinking that I would never, ever buy from him again. (Oh and telling a few thousand other people about the experience via the cyberwaves).


See you next year, Wonderwool! And thankyou! It was lovely.

Open letter

To the owner of a well-respected yarn business:

Thankyou for your reply.

As an ex-Ebay seller with many thousands of sales under my belt, I
absolutely agree, that it is extremely rare for a package to genuinely
go missing. It is usually the fault of the receiver, when they forget
to change an address, or neglect to pick up a package from the
delivery office. I can rule out both of these possibilities. Never did
a package go missing twice, as of course, one would take the
precaution of posting Recorded or Special Delivery second time around.

I look forward to getting my refund.
Many thanks

Hand spun beret finished

I spun the merino myself in two batches as you can see where the colours and texture change.

Knit magazine scandal

If you've heard the stories of non-payment by a certain publishing company you may be interested in reading this story. http://annisknittingblog.blogspot.com/

If you read knitting magazines, it may also be of interest to you. Or some other craft mags too. Have a look and pass the word around.

Wip wednesday

Been working on this one for a while and there is only the collar to do. Its in New Lanark wool as usual.


More Work-in-Progress projects here

Wonderwool wales

Anyone fancy sharing a car and/or driving to wonderwool wales from midlands or en route? Sat or sun ok. Please retweet. Ta. X -- SecretSheep (@SecretSheep)

Poncho mitts & s11

Just testing blogger on android. Here's the mitts to go with the poncho. This pic was taken on my lovely new samsung s11.

FO Poncho

It's been finished for a while, but I've only just got round to blogging it.
I love it, it's cosy warm.
I've also knitted matching arm warmers, which work amazingly well, as your arms have to keep popping out from the warmth in order to do anything.

See more FOs from other folk here at Finished Object Friday

WIP dangerously close to completion

Nearly there.....

After all that work to make a horizontal cabled border panel, I undid it. It didn't hang right and it was too heavy for the poncho.
So I simply knitted 6 rows of garter stitch and I'm now adding the tassels.
I even cut through the border to try to get it to hang right, and it must have taken 10 or more tries to get the front point right. Oh well, it was all good experience.

I am particularly pleased with the hood and its tassel. But I don't have a pic of that yet.
Maybe it will be a FO this Friday!

Find more WIPs on Wednesday here

Next WIP Hat

Here is the next hat. This one was supposed to be blue, but it appears there is only one section of the blue in the whole ball of yarn. I cheated and cut out a couple of stripes of yarn so I could use the blue, which is the colour the recipient wanted.

The finished article will look similar to this one. 

This is the yarn chosen by my friend, so you can see why I needed to get some blue in there..!

More WIP Wednesday posts to be found here. 

Matching mitts

Finished the mitts to match the hat....

And enjoyed knitting with this unusual yarn so much that I agreed to make another hat for a friend, in a different colourway. 

It's Patons Landscape, which appears to be discontinued. My next hat will be in this colourway

Poncho-to-be

It's nearing completion. 

It started off as a very simple poncho, but then I added a front central cable.
And then a horizontal cabled border.
And then a cable around the hood front.
And a slice of tree branch button closure.

So now it's nothing like the original pattern.
I just have to finish the hood, and a little bit of the horizontal border, and attach the button.
I started it at Center Parcs, and I want to wear it for the first time when we go back to Center Parcs in January.

I'm using my favourite New Lanark wool in chunky. (Why use anything else? It's cheap, it's pure wool and they deliver next day). 

Please go and see more WIPs from other folk at http://tamisamis.blogspot.com/2011/12/work-in-progress-wednesday-73.html

Earflap hat

Here is Sarah modelling an adult-sized earflap hat. 
I knitted it in a multi-stripe yarn, edged in blanket stitch, with a fat tassel and plaited ties.

Wonderful weekend

Center Parcs.
Sigh. We all want to be back there.
We went for a long weekend and had such a lovely time.
We stayed in a posh villa in Sherwood Forest with a sauna.

The highlight was seeing the girls overcome their fears of the water slides. Sarah has real anxieties over such things, to the extent of trembling at the suggestion, so this was a major step forward.  Rachel, however, has no such fears, and they don't build a slide big enough to worry her. She went abseiling and conquered the aerial adventure, showing some older boys how it should be done. They were a bit scared. I'm sure they felt better when an 8 year-old girl told them it was easy.

Of course I did some knitting, I started a poncho, but I'm saving that for WIP Wednesday.

Here is my FO Friday thing:

I said a couple of weeks ago that I wanted it finished, so
Ta-Daa! Tis done. Nice and long for a double wrap-around.

Now I just need to work out what to do with the left-over yarn.

Tuesday's Tallies

I've done another one!
Today's offering is White Cheviot.

Isn't that a nice sheepy looking sheep? And cute lambs, too.
I spun the wool quite thickly as that was how it asked to be spun (I agreed with another blogger recently that the wool itself decides how you spin it. I think that's quite true).
The wool crocheted rather nicely into its square, and tonight I sewed in the ends, labelled it and put it in its place in the blanket. It needs some Suffolk friends around it, so that will be my spinning for this week as I have run out.

Oh, and I found my dog brushes carders. They were in the bag were they were supposed to be. In the loft. Where I'd already looked. On the top.

Thankyou for visiting, and please look at some lovely work here in the Tuesday's Tallies collection. 

Handmade Monday

Handmade Monday is the perfect excuse to show you my cupcakes. Or some of them, anyway. I made 70 at the weekend for the children's School fund-raising event.

I overheard the organiser asking about somebody else's cakes, due to arrive at the same time, 'Are they professional ones as well?'
It's only a hobby, but that was a nice compliment.  Anyway, they all sold within minutes.

A few of my cupcake tips:

• Weigh the eggs with their shells on, and use the same weight of SR flour, sugar and margarine/butter. 
• Use half butter, half margarine for the buttercream, and 3 parts icing sugar to 2 parts butter/marg.  This keeps it buttery, but fluffy. 
• Use a Wilton 1M nozzle for the piping. It's the best. 
• Don't give them all away. 

WIP Wednesday

I'm really hoping this will be a FO soon.
It's been my travelling project for quite a while now, after being started a couple of years ago then forgotten.
I want to get started on my new travelling project, which is alpaca socks. (But not for an alpaca. I have enough trouble with a second sock, never mind a third and fourth).

It's knitted in Opal sock yarn and I shall just keep going until I run out of yarn.



Please pop over to Tami's Ami's to see more WIPs. 

Tuesday's Tallies

Soay sheep

This week I wanted to get my Soay square done.  I had to wash the fleece as it was raw and a teeny bit smelly.  I've just discovered (through Ravelry) that rams can have really stinky fleeces. Thankfully, I think this one must have been a ewe's fleece.

When it was dry, I couldn't find my carding brushes (really dog brushes) and found that one flick carder didn't really cut the mustard. So that's going to have to wait.

BUT whilst looking for the carders, I found a previously spun Swaledale square, ready to label and add to the blanket. I also found some spun Suffolk, which is the wool I use for every other square, and for joining them all.

So here is the Swaledale, labelled and in place. 

And now the right way round. 

So my Tally is: 2 this week. One Suffolk square, and one Swaledale. 10 squares to go. 

Thankyou for all the lovely comments on my first post last week. 

Do go over to see more tallies here