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.

It's spinning, but not as we know it...

I am not a naturally fine spinner, I have a default spinning style that produces a heavy fingering weight yarn. I'm pretty happy with this, you get lots of yardage from 100g, and you can do quite a lot with 300m of fingering weight. This yarn however, is rather thinner than this, I think you could safely call it frog hair. The lumps and bumps are because I'm spinning silk noil. 

I'm spinning frog hair because I was given one of these for my birthday. 

It's a Charkha, it's used commonly in India for spinning cotton. Ghandi used to spin on one for an hour each day. I'm not using it for spinning cotton, it's not a fibre or yarn I use very much. However it's great for spinning anything with a short staple, so far I've tried out camel and yak down. I'm off to FibreEast in a couple of weeks and plan on getting some cashmere to try as well. 

It's rather addictive, and is a very different style of spinning, the first attempts were very lumpy, but as I'm working out how to get the best out of it the results are getting more even. The silk noil is also helping, definitely hides any imperfections! 

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....