knit | spin

Final Project: Part Three

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 […]

Continue Reading

knit | spin

Final Project: Part Two

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, […]

Continue Reading

spin

Final Project: Part One

The Spinning Certificate I have been undertaking every month for the past 15 months is drawing to a close. The course is run by the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria and coordinated by the exceptionally experienced Carmel Hanna. As part of our assessment, we are required to produce a final project that demonstrates our […]

Continue Reading

knit | spin

New Tools

In E.M. Forster’s, A Room With A View (1908), old Mr Emerson, a radical thinker, has a wardrobe on which is painted ‘Mistrust all enterprises which require new clothes‘. It is a quote(ish) from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and I have always rather liked it and have expanded it as a mistrust of all enterprises requiring new […]

Continue Reading

spin

Worsted Nests

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 […]

Continue Reading

spin

Spinning Certificate Day One

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 […]

Continue Reading