Woolfest

I seem to be a bit jinxed with fibre festivals this year. Wonderwool was cold beyond belief, and I'm just back from Woolfest where it rained beyond belief.

I'm very lucky in that we have a camper van, the poor people in tents really suffered this weekend, either facing long drives the next morning due to having to go home, or having to sleep in the backs of vans. 

However, inside was dry (once I put a bucket in the corner to catch the drips), and filled with fluffy goodness of every variety. I got to speak to lots of existing customers, and enable lots of new spinners. 

This was my petite stall, filled with lots of fibre at the start of the show. I'm pleased to say that it was considerably emptier by the end of Saturday, as I'd bought 6 fleeces and was getting a bit worried about fitting them in the van.

I also needed space to bring home this lovely. I sold my Traveller at Wonderwool and this is her replacement, single treadle which suits me much better. This model of Traditional dates to around 1975 so is 10 years older than me, and spins beautifully still. 

Of course Woolfest wouldn't be Woolfest without saying hello to Bruno the Manx Loaghtan ram. Got any food?

I'm home now and busy unpacking, and updating the shop. It will take me a while to get everything done, but I'll get there eventually!

Fixed

Apologies for the long absense. The hard drive on my laptop died, and while it was fixed accessing all my sites was challenging to say the least!

I've also been very busy in my absence, I leave to go to Woolfest  tomorrow which means lots and lots of work. I'm nearly done, though there are a few jobs that have had to wait until I got my laptop back.
If you can't make it to Woolfest I will be taking the shop down on Thursday morning, I hope to have it back up on Sunday, but it might be Monday.

After we get back from Woolfest then the next big event to get excited about is the Tour de Fleece, I've done this every year since I learnt to spin. The basic principle is that you spin for a bit, every day that the Tour de France bike race is on. Twitter followers will already know that I am a cycling fan (just the watching mind you), so this marriage of 2 of my favourite things makes this time of year rather enjoyable!
If you want to join in, then head over to the Ravelry group, we don't have an official team this year, but I am in a few groups where you can come and join me.
Of course, all this spinning means that more fibre is needed, so there's 10% off with the code GOCAV, just enter it in to the coupon code box when you checkout.


This has turned in to a very wordy post so I will leave you with some chicken pictures. They've also been a bit broken reccently. They picked up scaly leg mite, which is now nearly better, and 4 of them went broody. Broody chickens very much remind me of teenage girls, they sit up a corner muttering to themselves, and take a peck at you if you dare to suggest they might want to go out an enjoy the sunshine...

However, they are all now nearly back to normal and are out and about rampaging through the garden. 

Boyo in particular is very happy, for a while his harem was reduced to 1, which really wasn't satisfactory. 

This grass looks tasty....

But I can't be bothered to move, so streeeetttcchhhh!

Meeting

One thing I love about the knitting and spinning community is it is just that. A community, I can show up anywhere, meet a group of people, and the only thing we have in common is our love of fiber. We sit, we reach out our yarn, or fibre, and we start to talk. To start off with it's about what we're knitting, or what we're spinning, but in half an hour there will be half a dozen different conversations going on, and the next thing you know it's 6 hours later and you really should be getting home, but you really don't want to.

I did just that on Saturday, I turned up at a strangers house, was fed beautiful home cooked food, and talked, and spun, and knitted, and talked.

(L-R, Sheelagh, LittleMy)

We had all talked originally because of our involvement in this group on Ravelry. I've made no secret of my feelings on the dealings of ACM and Kerrie Allman, I happen to believe that what she has done is very wrong, and that she should not be allowed to continue to scam people out of money. This group of ladies happen to feel the same, this lovely lady (Pompom) was visiting the UK from Australia, so we decided to make the post of the opportunity and meet up. 

(PomPom)

She won't thank me for this picture, but I did promise here I'd include a picture of someone stuffing a scone with cltted cream in her mouth, she just doesn't know it was of her!

Speaking of Scones, our hostess had been baking them for us that morning, served with clotted cream and strawberries they were beautiful. 

(No1Alicat, SallyH)

And none of them turned out to be axe murderers either....

Young Farmers

Warning, this post is a bit photo heavy, I think you'll agree it's worth it though!

This weekend I was at Shropshire show. We had a stall right by the main ring so I got to see lots of interesting things. The stars of the show were definitely the Shropshire Young Farmers Clubs. They not only did tractor pulling races, but also provided my highlight of the day. Young people often get a lot of bad press, but hearing what this lot had been up to, and the amount of money raised for charity was really inspiring. Each area cub had to build a float based around a TV show theme, and I think you'll agree that what they made was amazing. What you can't see in these pictures is that most of them had moving parts, and some had some machines. 

Only Fools and Horses, complete with a fake chandelier, and a moving Reliant Robin.

A slightly tilted (no idea what happened here!) Dad's Army

Thomas the Tank Engine

Fireman Sam

Wallace and Gromit

Thunderbirds, complete with FAB1 and moving rockets

Postman Pat

Strictly Come Dancing, with moving trombone players, and a working glitter ball

Dr Who, with a shaking Tardis and smoke

The winner though, was The Magic Roundabout. Not only was the painting and woodwork exquisite, they also had a rotating roundabout, and a bouncing Zebedee!

At the show I was also interviewed by Radio Shropshire, you can listen to it here for a couple more days. It's from about 57 minutes in. 

If you're in the UK and fancy getting out and about during half term week, I'll be spinning at Machynlleth market next week (unless the weather is appalling). It's a lovely part of the world, just up the road from where Spring Watch is being filmed. It's also right by the Dyfi Osprey Project, where the eggs are just hatching, it would be lovely to say hi to some of you. 

Fleece Washing

My friend Katherine lives about 20 miles from me. She has a small flock of interesting sheep. They're all kept for their fleeces rather than as a meat producing flock, which does mean that she has a large number of castrated males, much to the astonishment of her meat producing neighbours....

She does interesting things with crosses, she has Gotlands, BFL, and Welsh Black Mountains primarily, but sometimes uses other rams for the crosses. She's also in the middle of building her own timber framed, straw bale house. Once the building work is over she's going to be selling far more of this rather yummy fibre. For now, I'm just happy I get advance previews!

This is from one of her boys, it's Gotland crossed with Lincoln (I think!), and it's a beautiful silvery white. Lots of white fleece is actually rather creamy, but once this is washed it shimmers.

The weather here is gorgeous at the moment, ideal fleece washing weather. These chunks were dry in a couple of hours, thanks to her spin dryer (I'm still trying to track one down...). 

We also had a play with some that she'd washed previously. 

This is a bump that I combed, which probably isn't the best prep for this fibre, it would work better carded in our opinion, but Katherine has some nice fine combs and I wanted to try them to see if I'd use them more than my ones (probably not was the answer). It just begs to be spun with a low twist and allowed to be fluffy.

Royal Welsh Spring Festival

I'll be away again this weekend. I'm heading back down to the Royal Welsh Showground in Builth Wells for the Spring Festival. This used to be called the Smallholder and garden festival, but they've re-named it.
If you're free at all it's well worth a visit, there looks like being lots to see and do.
I'm not technically going as HilltopCloud, I'm helping my Mum out on her stall selling garden things made from wood and slate. However, I am taking spindles and lots of beginner friendly fluff with me so hopefully I can enable a few people.
If you're planning on coming, and wanted to look at something in particular please email me , I won't have lots of stock there, but am more than happy to take along specific items.

I'll be replying to emails etc. when I get back on Monday.

A grand day out

Today I went to Quarry Bank Mill with my spinning guild. It's an old cotton spinning and weaving factory on the outskirts of Manchester. It's run by the National Trust as a working museum, the original Victorian machines are no more, but the  machines from the 1950's that replace them work in very similar ways.
The whole mill is powered by a huge water wheel (one of the largest of it's kind), and nestles in the bottom of a valley surrounded by woodland.

Inside the mill they have machines that take the cotton from its raw state to finished cloth.

A carder that left me feeling rather jealous.... not only does it card, it also draws off the fibre in to what we spinners would probably call top.

It then gets drawn out in to something very similar to pencil roving

Finally this is spun on huge machines that run the length of the factory floor.

Interestingly they have a working copy of the machine that led to these industrialised ones. This machine is the intermediate step between the spinning wheel, and the giant powered ones. Using it looks to be something of a challenge as you need to be able to stand on one leg, turn the wheel to add twist with one hand, and pull the frame back to do the drafting with the other. I was longing to have a go....

Their replica is proving to be a little bit temperamental at the moment, getting all 16 bobbins to turn at the same rate, and to produce even thread is a challenge. The lady was saying that they suspect that the higher quality cloth was still reliant on the spinning wheel as that could produce a consistent, high quality even thread.

Once spun, the thread is woven in to cloth, a weaver would be responsible for 4 looms and in a week could produce 1000m of cloth.

I went on several school trips to the mill as a child, and it was nice to go back and look at it all through the eyes of a spinner and a weaver. It makes you appreciate how much was made possible by the invention of these machines.