Support

I just tweeted about posting parcels. It's Monday morning, which means it's parcel day. I only post on 2 mornings per week. Partly because it's more efficient, and partly because I'm limited by the opening hours of our post office.
It's been a busy weekend in the shop which is lovely, and I'm also posting the Handblended Club this morning. That means there are 4 large Ikea bags all full of parcels. In response to my tweet a friend said  you can just print the postage online and then drop them off. This is an option, but it's not currently what I chose to do.

Our post office is in the garage a mile from our house. It's run by Dilys, who is the wife of our neighbouring farmer. Dai and Dilys are the "go-to" people in our community, if you have a problem or question they will either help, or know someone who can. When our water was blocked (we're not on mains water) last year, Dai and his son were the ones who un-blocked it.

Our community is small, our village isn't much more than a hamlet, and it's 20 minutes drive to the nearest small town. A resource like our own post office is something to be treasured, and used. If I print my parcels online and drop them off at the post office, it means that the postage isn't going through the records of my small post office. Dilys is also very nice, and lets me drop off the parcels and come back to pay later, it's not even that I have to wait around for them. It also means she can fit in other customers around my parcels.
Should Post Office closures in my area be looked at, it would be disastrous if we lost this resource, instead of a 3 mile round trip, I'd have to do a 30 mile round trip to post my parcels. It's in my own interest to get Dilys to post my parcels rather than use the online postage.

Getting in to the spirit

I am immensely lucky in my job, for the past few days the TV has been showing wall to wall Olympics. I can usually card while keeping half an eye on the TV, the past few days have been all about the handblended club and preparing 3kg of the same blend can drive me a little bit batty unless I have something to entertain me at the same time.

The evening's are my time however, and I get to indulge in my own thing. Sometimes it's spinning, sometimes it's knitting, usually it's a bit of both.

Here's my choice of projects for the Olympics

It's a colour affection shawl using the handspun I created during the Tour de France. It's going to be a fantastic reminder of a wonderful summer of sport, a real once in a lifetime summer, that I can't quite believe I get to witness. 

Labels

In this game, labels are important, everything needs a label. When I'm at shows those labels are important because some people are after certain fibre combinations, or need to avoid certain fibres.
Even in the online shop, labels are important, if stuff isn't clearly labelled it's all too easy for someone to be sent the wrong thing. (Yes it has happened, but it all gets put right, with huge apologies, we're human, and my lovely customers are very understanding about mistakes)

For ages I've used full size business cards as labels on everything. They work, they're not expensive, but I didn't like the company I was getting them from (I won't name names, but I bet you can work it out). They didn't print the cards in the UK, which is important to me. Hole punching and threading tags on to plaits of fibre is also an absolute pain, if you have 50 to label, it's one of those fiddly annoying jobs that leaves you muttering and swearing at the end of it!

I decided there had to be a better solution. There was a post on the Knitty blog a while ago about labelling skeins of handspun using tyvek wristbands, and I had a lightbulb moment. What would work for skeins of handspun, would work for braids of fibre. They come with a sticky strip so no more hold punching and threading, and I can get them custom printed by a UK based small business. There's also no danger of them ripping off. It you want to use them as a tag for your finished skein you still can, you can either slide it off as a loop, or cut and hole punch like a regular tag.

That just left the rest of the fibre, all the things that you really can't put tag like this on...

I've ummed and ahhhed for a few weeks trying to decide what to do, and I've decided to switch to a smaller, full colour, British printed, using trees from sustainable sources, card. They're more expensive than my old cards, but so are the wristbands, and I feel so much happier about using them, and the new company.

So look out for the new cards, and labels, I hope you like them. 

Fibre East

For the first time this year I got to go to a fibre festival as just me! No stall, no stock, just me with money in my pocket, and a whole day of freedom.

First job of the day was to drop off my Woolsack cushion so I had room in the shopping bag for purchases.



This is me with the lovely Jane who runs the whole Woolsack project. In summary it's part of the cultural Olympiad and aims to give all the Athletes coming to London for the Olympic and Paralympic Games a cushion made of British wool.  The response from Athletes has been fantastic so they would love to have more cushions, details of how to join in are on their website.  (I'm currently churning out another one, as is Mum)

After that the day all passed in a bit of a blur, it's a 4 hour drive for me so I didn't get to spend as long as  I would have liked, but I did get to catch up with lots of friends, and the fleece collection in the caravan has been added to!

I also got to meet the fantastic Sheer Sheep and his collection of sheep, I was very good and resisted having one of them shorn to order however.

The weather on the Sunday was beautiful, though the weather on Friday night had unfortunately meant that the site became rather muddy, particularly for the Saturday visitors. However,I've been to shows where the conditions underfoot were far worse, and as you can see from this picture, by Sunday the sun had come out.

Was it worth the 8 hour round trip, definitely, will I be back next year, yes, though I've yet to decide if I'll keep it as my festival off, or if I'll apply for a stall.

Bees

In keeping with life here becoming increasingly Good Life-esque, Mum got some bees about a month ago. Until recently I've had to watch from a distance because we only have one bee suit, but we just got another which means I can give Mum a hand if she needs it.

Warning, photo heavy post...

This is part of the hive lid, you can see the bees busy eating, when you smoke them, instinct kicks in, they think there's a forest fire so franticly eat their stores so they can fly to safety and re-establish the colony. 

 Our hive is brand new, and you can see the difference between the frames we got the colony on, and our new frames.

This is a brand new frame, with the wax foundation, the bees are just starting to make the comb ready to fill. 

This frame has already got the comb, but there isn't much honey there yet, the weather has been so bad that it's really slowed them down. 

This comb is starting to fill with capped honey.

These cells have been filled with pollen, there's huge variation in pollen colours, even some that's green.

The bee in the centre has obviously just got back from collecting some of that green pollen, she's got huge clumps of it on her legs. 

This is one of the main brood frames, encouragingly we have lots of capped brood cells.

If you look closely you can just see some of the grubs in the bottom of these cells, eventually they'll be capped, and the pupae will develop in to an adult bee.

We might not get much honey this summer if things carry on like they are at the moment, but hopefully the colony will stay healthy through the winter and we can have a good year next year!

Godis Skum

Earlier this week I ventured out of Wales and made for the mecca of all things home ware that is Ikea. An awful lot of my furniture has come from Ikea, for a combination of style and price reasons. This trip has been planned for a while, but Woolfest and work have meant it's been put off for several weeks.

However, I now have a comfy chair for spinning, most important given I'm spinning for the tour de fleece. I've also got on top of the storage I needed for the business.

I also found some Godis Skum.... aka marshmallow sheep!

Very tasty they are too. I've spent today surrounded by sheep as I helped our local farmer roll fleeces as they were shorn. They're only Welsh Mountains so not really any use for the sort of things I spin, but it was interesting day, and I got to have a go at shearing a couple of sheep myself at the end. No pictures because it was rather wet and mucky even though we were in a barn, so you'll have to make do with a Godis Skum picture!

Hideaway

Look what has decided to nest in our log pile!
The bird in question is a wagtail, 2 years ago they nested in a pile of breeze blocks, this year they've found a gap in between some logs and nested in it. Mum had noticed it flying about in this area for the last couple of days and managed to spot the nest this morning. We're not sure if the first nest failed (remember the dreadful weather we had a couple of weeks ago?), or if they normally raise 2 broods in a summer.
Either way, we'll be keeping our distance (though they seem pretty used to us coming and going), and we hope to have some wagtails hatching soon.