A Wooly weekend

Once a year, Wingham Wool Works visits the local area enabling a lot of spinners, knitters, felters and others to get their 'Fibre Fix'.

They set up on the Friday evening and provide two days for perusing, sampling and buying their wares.

Many ladies come to sit and spin because, for £6 for each day, you can take sample lengths to try out.

Others come to just buy....well, in point of fact, most of us are seduced into buying at some stage. There is a vast array of fibres from Merino and Merino/Silk blend, linen and various man-made fibres, through all sorts of luxury ones, such a silk, camel down, cashmere and Quivet; this last probably the most expensive of all, so not much comes along...There is a selection of books and journals, equipment, dyestuffs, yarns and everything necessary for felting and needlefelting. 

Ruth Gough, who with her husband Alan, owns Winghams, gives demonstrations of spinning techniques and the use of various pieces of equipment to process fibre with.

This year, I decided I wouldn't get any fibres except some for a felting project for which I didn't have the right colours...

However, I also succumbed to the temptation of some of the luxury yarns for my smaller projects. 

From left to right these fibres are,
Dyed Tussah silk
Camel down
Mulberry silk
Camel down and silk
Yak and silk

About half the Tussah silk tops are spun and will be plied with some dyed Gotland singles which are ready. The rest, I haven't decided about yet.

This is the dyed Gotland fibre, which I finished spinning on the Saturday and...

...this is the silk. In reality, the Gotland is rather darker than it looks in this picture: one is fairly hairy and the other very smooth, so I am interested to see how they blend.

Instead of doing lots of sampling (although I did some), I plied some other yarns I had previously spun but I haven't been organised enough to write down what they are.

As always, it was a very good and sociable weekend!

Visiting a show....

This weekend, we took a day out to visit the Creative Crafts Show being held at the Three Counties Showground in Malvern www.sccshows.co.uk It had been on for two days already and Saturday was the last. We took the motorhome as we haven't been out in it much and found somewhere to park have lunch before going into the show itself.

One of my main reasons for going this year, like last, was because the Knitting and Crochet Guild has a stand there but this time, I wasn't helping out.

The stand looked very good and the fact that it was so much bigger this year helped a good deal. Lots of people stopped by and I was told it had been quite hectic at times.

I sat for a while and had a chat and then set off to have a look around. I wasn't after any wool or fleece, or indeed, anything else but predictably, before I left, later on I did get my purse out.

There was lots of yarn for sale, buttons and haberdashery, jewellery and patchwork, together with some foods and some paper work. 

There were also a number of workshops each day.

In the end, I bought a very large Lucet and some yarn from New Forest Mohair. I bought some of their yarn last year and found it beautiful to knit with, although generally, I am not a great fan of this particular wool.

We bought a cake from the purveyors of such things and had a tea break, then returned to say goodbye to everyone and have a last look round. By that time, some stall holders were beginning to put their things away and outside, the rains had returned....