Ooooh, pretty!

I thought I'd provide some pretty eye candy that has brightened up my week. A few posts back, I showed some pictures of my spoils from Woolfest. Lurking in one of those pictures was a pile of space-dyed merino roving.

In fact, here it is...


Well, it occurred to me that it was probably too good to felt and that the particular blend of colours would be lost when combined with other roving I have. To cut a long story short, I got in touch with the wonderful Lilith who spun and plied it for me, and now I have approximately 190 yards of heavy sock yarn.


So, what to do with it? I didn't want to make any decisions before I saw the yarn as I couldn't picture what would happen to the colour distribution once it was plied. Now I've seen it, and it's beautiful, I really want to make the most of it. Suggestions please...

Woolfest Part II

So - what was in the bag?

Well, there was some of this ...

and some of this...

a little of this...

some of these...

and a few balls of this...

The roving was bought for felting - something I've fancied doing for a while. I've used up the ends of bits of Noro Kureyon in the past to make small felted balls which I want to join together to make a table mat, but I need a lot more balls. The white will form the cores of the balls and the colours will cover the outsides. I've also fancied having a go at making felted soaps so I'll use some for that too.

The beautiful pink and orange roving in the foreground was also intended for felting, but now I think that might be a bit of a waste so I'm looking into having it spun into a sock-weight yarn.

The lopi roving is for knitting and then felting. This caught my eye recently and I think Splat might really like it. I also fancy making this market bag from knitty which Lene has made and finished so beautifully recently.

The sock yarn is for the resident radiologist's delectation (once knitted of course) and I haven't a clue what I'm going to do with the baby alpaca 4-ply. It's a fairly heavy 4-ply (almost a DK) and there is 200m per skein so I'm thinking maybe a little cardi with elbow-length sleeves. To be honest, I just really loved the colour and had to bring it home!

Finally, the buttons are intended for Wisp.

All in all, I think I was fairly restrained. There was loads more I'd have liked to have bought, but I tried hard to have something in mind before I bought yarn. The baby alpaca was the only item which slipped through the mental net...

Woolfest 2007

Where to start... well on Friday I took a day's annual leave from work, picked up a friend and drove down to Cockermouth for Woolfest 2007. This was the third annual woofest but the first one I had made it to. This said, I'd heard about the previous ones from enough friends to have a plan of attack.

India said that the first time she walked in, she hyperventilated for about 10 minutes and had blown her budget within a further 10 minutes. To counter this, I took my budget in cash so I couldn't overspend and I made my way round all the stalls with my wallet firmly at the bottom of my bag and only let myself buy things on the second and third rounds.

So what was there?

Well, there were plenty of these,

and these,

and these...

There were even a couple of these,

and some of these...



Then there was even more of this,

and this,and this...
I finally came away with this (having done some shameless advertising for Katherine). Details to follow soon.


As my friend put it, 'We just drove for 6 hours to buy wool didn't we?'

Oh yes...