Wednesday 7 November 2012

Knitting with handspun

I love knitting with my handspun. 
The texture, is amazing, and I love that I can spin up yarn that I could never buy in the shop. 


This is Shaelyn, knitted slightly larger by adding more repeats, using 200g of fibre from the March edition of my handblended club. This fibre had a few sceptics when it arrived in the post. 


The base colour was blue, but I'd picked to pair it with an accent colour of bright pink, however, when you spun it up you ended up with a tweedy style yarn.

The fibre was a blend of Shetland, Merino and Silk, nice and soft, yet strong, and with a sheen from the silk. 
You don't see the tweedy look from a distance, but get close, and the pink flecks become more obvious. 





If you want to enable a few more people to be able to knit or crochet with their handspun then I've just added a new smaller Learn to Spin kit to the shop. It contains 50g of British processed Ryeland roving, in white or brown. Ryeland are a bit of an under appreciated breed of sheep, they used to have wool so fine that it rivalled the Spanish Merino and Queen Elizabeth I would only wear Ryeland stockings. Modern pressures for meat have meant the fleece has coarsened slightly, but it's still nice and soft. Having a proper roving, rather then the combed top we commonly call roving, makes life easier for beginners, it's easy to draft, yet at the same time grippy. 
It's slightly smaller than my existing Learn to Spin kit, which makes it lighter so postage abroad is much lower. 





2 comments:

  1. I'm very tempted by one of your learn to spin kits, I've been doing a bit of weaving lately and would love to use the resulting fibre for that :)

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  2. Nice to see Ryeland getting a mention.

    ReplyDelete