A couple of weeks ago, I attended Day One of the Spinning Certificate at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria. The Certificate is a rigorous grounding in a broad range of spinning techniques in order to design and produce yarns for specific purposes. I was so excited the night before it started, I kept […]
Last week there was no post as I was resting up in preparation for teaching at Craft Sessions 2018 and this week, well…now I am needing to rest after the teaching! ME/CFS is a frustrating, inconvenient illness but I delight in the capacity I have now. Such an effort would have been impossible 18 months […]
This is Part Three of a short series about the handspun, knitted spencer I made as the final project in completion of the Certificate of Spinning, run by Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria. Part One explored the spinning process, Part Two documented the knitted article. In Part Three, I share my road testing of […]
Worsted in such a lovely word. I particularly favour the woost-ed pronunciation. It has a few meanings. It can mean a particular weight or thickness of yarn, specifically a medium weight yarn equivalent to the Australian/UK 10 ply. And, it also refers to a particular style of yarn where all the fibres are of the same length and […]
In the midst of the maelstrom of seasonal madness, I would like to share some wonderful news with you all. Knitty.com has just published an original design of mine in its Winter 2018 edition. In fact, to my great surprise and joy, it made the Knitty Spin cover. The design is called Spinal Twist, a […]
knit | look | spin
Memento Mori
This post is about a sheep, a very special sheep called HRH or Old Leader. HRH, photo by Nan Bray, used with her permission In 2016, I had the great fortune to encounter a very lovely fleece from White Gum Wool whilst studying for the Spinning Certificate run by the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of […]
Shearing in Victoria seems to start in mid October and run through December. Some farms run open days where you can pick out the fleeces you want, others send out fleeces by the kilo in the post and others take orders prior to shearing. I’ve had a special fleece on order for months and months. During […]
Here is a pair of socks I love wearing but are seldom worn…perfect for my focus during Slowtober on remaking. The problem with these socks is twofold. Firstly, the cast off around the cuffs is too tight making them difficult to pull up and stay up. Secondly, I spun these socks early in my spinning […]
I haven’t dived into anything big since moving but I thought I would share the beginnings of the sampling methodology that I am developing for my spinning. It is a method derived from methods we learned during the Spinning Certificate at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, bits and pieces picked up from watching […]
And here it is…my final project for the Spinning Certificate run by the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria. The pattern is a Pattern for a Sleeveless Spencer by Marian Leslie from the Shetland Wool Week Annual 2016. I used a fifty:fifty blend of alpaca and Polwarth fleeces, carded into rolags and spun into a two ply, […]
