Roll on 2010!

Hello again! Hope you all had a great Christmas time and are getting ready for the new year! As I am still in Switzerland and without my spinning wheel, there clearly hasn't been much crafting going on. I found my watercolour paints again though and have been playing around with them a bit...

Well, the new year already seems to be busy and all planned out, but eventually I shall be back with more yarns than ever. Also, I may be selling some hand carded batts in my etsy shop for a very limited time - more on that later. :)

Enjoy the last few hours of 2009! It was a good year. :D

Graffiti

A beautiful graffiti I saw the other day in Wuppertal in Germany. Of course I also checked out the local yarn shop... Lang, Rowan and Noro yarns were all there, nicely lined up. :)

Having fun in Germany

My blog absence has a valid reason and good excuse (or so I think): I am currently in Germany! I spent the last two weeks in a little town in the East of Germany for business reasons. On a little trip I stumbled over this old police car, which can now just be booked for parties and such, an interesting end to a police car...

And look at this cool-looking bar of chocolate (with peanuts), I had to get a few of them, and they're actually not all that bad. But I really did mainly buy them for their oh so basic graphic design. ;)

Moved in but still not really here

Hey! I feel terrible for having neglected this blog, but the truth is, I still don't have Internet in the new house. In the meantime I have started the new job and they are sending me abroad for 2 weeks - and where else than Germany! Isn't life funny? My etsy shop is in vacation mode during this time but I do hope to be able to reopen after I get back with lots of new items.

In other exciting fibre-y news I am now the proud owner of an Ashford drumcarder and I have been using it lots already. It's great fun and so much easier and faster to use than my hand carders. More news on all of these things once I get back.... just before going home for Christmas.... well, at the latest, see you in the new year. :P

V

Moving

Hey there, just a really quick update that I will be moving tomorrow morning! Everything is packed and we are ready to go. If all works out I will arrive in the UK on Sunday and will hopefully get settled reasonably soon. The Etsy shop is also currently closed but will reopen once I can get to all my yarns again and I changed the shipping. :)

All the best,
Veronika

Please vote on the Etsy voter!

One of my yarns has been nominated to be in an etsy vote with the topic of handspun yarns. Of course I would absolutely love it if you took a peek over there as well and perhaps voted for my 'mistress yarn', or whatever else is your favourite. There are lots of pretty yarns to look at on there. :)

http://www.etsy.com/voter_list.php?ref=voter&room_id=68

Thanks!

Mulberry silk yarn

I meant to show off these silks ages ago! Pretty recently I was lucky enough to get a small box of finely spun, pure Mulberry silk lace yarns into my possession. They will eventually be dyed (I am guessing once I get back to the UK) and will be so perfect for lace projects! I will definitely have to keep at least some of it to work on a pretty shawl or something similar. :D

Additionally I just ordered more sock yarn in my 'normal' fibre base as well as a 100% Superwash Merino fingering weight yarn, which would work for socks, but would also be ideal for other projects (As usual, I am thinking lace again). All of these fibres will move with me to the UK in now less than two weeks!

Just one more week at my job as well, so this is really the time to get nervous. Having said that, I am surpirisingly calm, after I realised that packing shouldn't take me all that long I am actually just really looking forward to my move and to getting slightly more settled. :)

Moving SALE!

With it being just 2 weeks until I am moving, I decided to have a moving sale throughout the whole shop!
I am truly hoping to move with very few yarns in my luggage so there is lots of spinning and listing currently going on.
The offer goes like this: buy any two or more yarns/items (listings, basically) and get a 10% refund of the price before shipping.

On other news there has been lots and lots of spinning, including 'fruit cocktail', the yarn to the left. It includes a sweet variety of fruity polymer clay beads, handmade by the amazing lilley! Also check out her embroidered houses in hoops, I love this colourful one!

4 weeks.

As some of you may know, I will soon be leaving my job, flat and life in Germany behind and will be moving to the UK. Well, and this 'soon' has been nearing really quickly and it is now in only 4 weeks time! Am I panicking? Perhaps a little bit. Did I have a clue as to how big my fabric collection is? Not really.

What I have been doing the last few weeks though, was to spin as many yarns as possible and use up all the little odds and ends I have lying around. A great side effect of using up some odd bits has been the creation of a new yarn style called 'Art museum'. I have since spun another 2 skeins of this style and am spinning up another one right now. It is an addictive spinning style and I am planning on adding it to my shop to stay. I mainly used wools and some silks and other fibres to create this bulky yarn. The coils which are featured throughout are safely locked into position and do not move around.

Stack of rolags

In the absence of a drum carder, I card all my mixed fibres with hand carders. This sometimes results in a huge mountain of rolags. :P

On the top are some blue/white mixes and the bottom is subtly dyed Merino/silk with white organic linen. I will be adding a few meters from my treasured collection of cotton and linen laces to these fibres and spin them up into something with an old time feel to it. :)

Wire core spinning

My latest art yarn is a seemingly simple yarn which has been spun around a wire core. You can therefore bend this yarn and do all kinds of things without even touching any knitting needles.

The fibre is a hand-processed Suri Alpaca, in fact the only bit I tried to comb and then dye, so very one of a kind.

There are so many options for wire core yarns that I might consider spinning more of them, but not too soon as it took such a long time!

Baltic souvenirs

I am back from my short trip and am back to spinning and listing new yarns. But before I forget, here are some of the things I brought home.

First up some gorgeous latvian yarn bought in a small souvenir shop in Riga. I absolutely fell in love with those mittens and have since purchased this amazing book and am planning on knitting at least a few of them. Before I got to the cities I researched the shops online and for Riga I owe my thanks to this blog post. In Tallinn I seem to have missed a good few of them, but found some and bought some lovely wooden hand crafted buttons as well as some thin pencil roving (third picture).
In Helsinki I stumbled into Marimekko! Of course I knew the name, but only from really cool patterns in the 60s, so I was genuinely surprised to see that they are still going and thriving with lots of gorgous shops! They now sell pretty much everything from clothes to bags, to napkins, umbrellas or mugs. However, they also sell fabric by the meter! Most of it was thin cotton fabric at a really high price. As nice as the patterns were, I really wasn't convinced by the quality (think IKEA) and didn't buy any of these. On the other end they did sell some of the heavy weight (bark cloth) fabrics which they also use in their own bags. The patterns weren't quite as exciting, but I still carried home a few meters, including this bright polka dot fabric!







Next up is a shot with a linen fabric as well as cotton and linen lace, the thin pencil roving and the wooden buttons.





In Vilnius (probably my favourite of the cities) I found a linen shop chain, where they sold all types of linen fabrics as well as absolutely stunning linen lace, so I had to get a little collection. :)

My messy table

my working table
Originally uploaded by snowberrylime

Soooooo.... this is how a table looks like when it is being used! :P

There are some of my Tour de Fleece yarns on there as well as part of a wholesale order.

Right now I have taken out my sewing machine again, so whilst there are less yarns, it doesn't exactly look any better, haha.

Holiday!

I am afraid the regular pictures for the TDF will have to take a backseat as I will be going on a vacation the next 10 days. :D
Of course I will be taking my beautiful Turkish spindle from Jenkins and some stunning milk protein fibre which I recently dyed. There will definitely be daily spinning, but I doubt I will be able to post regularly.

For those who are interested, I will be going to Helsinki (hopefully meeting up with an old friend), Tallinn (which I read is quite a woolshop centre), Riga and Vilnius, so an entirely new area for me. Usually I am not one to squeeze that many places into one week, but this time I am really looking forward to it.
Let's see what kind of fabric/wool souvenirs I can find on the way........ ;)

This also means that I won't be able to ship any yarns bought in my shop during this time, but I will be back to listing lots of new yarns once I am back!

TDF Day 12

On day 12 I finished spinning another relatively simple yarn made up of one ply of organic falkland wool and one ply of Merino/silk, all hand dyed. The yarn rests on a bed of handcarded rolags (14 in total) which will be spun into my next yarn. :)

TDF Day 10 and 11

Day 10 of the Tour is officially a day of rest, but I have to admit I did spin on some singles for plying at a later stage. It's addiction, honey. ;)

I don't know what I spent doing all day today, but it really wasn't an awful lot of spinning. My meagre results for today are a brown organic wool yarn with Mohair locks (for a swap) and a Tussah silk single from fibre I tried to dye with natural dyes (redwood) ages ago. I spent a lot of yesterday picking out the little pieces of wood from this silk. Yes, next time I *will* use some kind of a net to put the plant parts in....

TDF Day 9

Today I got my pirate queen yarn done, 'Anne Bonny'. The other one is a skein of my classic, 'Rokoko', a Merino/silk yarn with real freshwater pearls.

Tour de Fleece Week 1

As promised, but with a slight delay: the yarns of one busy week of spinning for the Tour de Fleece!

TDF Day 8

Today I was mainly carding, but I also spun a few yards at the lake with my Turkish spindle, but alas, no pictures...

The one yarn I properly worked on is my pirate queen:
It will be plied up with beads next.

TDF Day 7

On Friday I worked on these two yarns as well as 100g of Merino/silk (no pictures yet) and a small skein of pure Tussah silk lace yarn. I was only able to take pictures today though. :)
The blue one is called jellyfish and features white bamboo, lots of sequins and beaded trim as well as some more of thos rolags I carded the last few days.

TDF Day 6

Today I finally finished my ocean treasure yarn! The beaded skein is about 200m of a fine 2ply yarn. From the same rolags I also spun a matching corespun yarn. :)

TDF Day 5

On day 5 of the Tour de Fleece I worked a bit more on my ocean treasure yarn, pictured are the two singles. They are both spun from handcarded rolags and the bottom ply has lots of ocean type beads, pearls and shells in it.

TDF Day 4

Well, today was a very long day at work, so I only got very little spun up. I worked more on the ocean treasure yarn, but haven't really got much to show for, so I will leave this post without a picture. I will definitely try to get something finished tomorrow though!

As a lot of the pictures leave lots to be desired, I thought I should post a picture of all of them washed and skeined at the end of each week. :)

TDF Day 3

Today was day 3 of the Tour de Fleece, but sadly for me it was also a work day. That and the fact that I also had to bake some cakes meant that I wasn't as productive as I would have liked.

All I got done are three and a bit skeins of soy silk and a blue/white yarn consisting of one ply of undyed organic cotton and one ply of a hand carded batt in blues. Not the best pictures ever, but it was dark and the yarns hadn't been washed yet to set the twist. :)


I also worked a little bit on my ocean treasure art yarn, but it will take a long time to finish. I am intending on making it a 2ply yarn.

TDF Day 2

The second day of the Tour de Fleece saw some more stash busting. For my first yarn I just randomly spun up leftover fibre (mostle wool and silk) and then plied it with thread. Whilst doing this I added lots of chunky coils - and the good thing is, they don't move at all, they are really well secured. It was sadly already dark when I took a lot of the pictures, but here we go:



































I then went on to work on the rolags I carded the night before. I spun up a single yarn with this Alpaca/wool/silk/linen fibre and added strips of a very sweet dotted cotton fabric. I let a red sparkle thread wrap around the yarn and included many types of gems on the way. Again, the pictures aren't the best, but it is late and I wanted to post this. :)






















































The last thing I did today was to prepare everything for my first nautical themed yarn of the race: Treasure of the seven seas. I carded hand dyed organic Falkland wool with Merino/silk, hand dyed silk noil and throwsters waste silk filament. All natural fibres and the yarn is going to really special. I beaded shell pieces, small shells, freshwater pearls and teal glass crystals onto a sparkle thread and am ready to spin this up with some sequins.

TDF Day 1

On my first day of the Tour de Fleece I spun 100g of a bulky, hand dyed Merino/silk single yarn as well as something more arty. The art yarn is called twister and had as a main purpose to get rid of some of my uglier fibres in the stash. These include horrible commercially dyed colours or batts with weird glitz effect... I carded them all together on my hand cards and hoped for the best. As a single yarn I still thought it looked rather awful, but once I used this new twisty technique it looked really adorable!

Spinning for the Tour de Fleece!

Just like last year, there is another Tour de Fleece starting today! What is the Tour de Fleece, you ask? Well, during the time of the Tour de France, lots of spinners are setting themselves challenges or joining together in groups to spin yarns. The time is Saturday July 4th through Sunday July 26th with these days of rest: Monday July 13th, Monday July 20th (Just like the actual tour). On Wednesday July 22nd we are expected to spin something especially challenging, as this is the hardest day of the Tour.
The Tour de Fleece is currently hosted on ravelry and I have joined a few groups (below are ravelry links, you need to register to see them).

This is actually my first Tour de Fleece, as I didn't manage to be at home for any of the past ones.
I have joined a few great teams and am hoping to be able to keep up with all of them!

Breakaways - This is the group for art yarns, so very much my home territory. As my personal challenge I am really trying to concentrate on pushing myself just that little bit further in the art yarn department. It has gotten easy for me to spin simpler single yarns and leave the fancy ingredients out, but in the next few weeks I will try to change that around.

Stash Busters - Yeah, I am almost tempted to say 'no comment'. As I will soon be moving, I really need to decrease my stash. I found loads of undyed Merino deep down in the corner, there is still a fair bit of hand dyed organic falkland wool and gorgeous cashmere, silk, milk protein fibre and more. Also, let's not forget about the huge bags of raw alpaca fleece... yes, yes, I remember them as well.

Tour de Fish, and here - This is rawfish's colourful group! I loved the theme so much that I just had to join. It's all about boats, pirates, mermaids and the seven seas...

Snobby spinners - I'be also joined the snobby spinners, a) because I love luxury fibres and b) because I finally ought to use them, just cuddling is no longer good enough.

Germany - Last but not least I also joined my regional group. At the moment it is very quiet there, but I am sure we can get this going. :)

So yes, that makes 5 teams and I hope I am up for it! Right now I have already spun one yarn and a bit, but I am planning on doing daily updates of what I spun for the Tour, so more about this tonight. :)

Doing some serious destashing

destash beige 1
Originally uploaded by snowberrylime

Well, it is official, I have terminated my flat for end of September and am gettting ready to move back to Wales from Germany.

However, as some of you may guess, I have accumulated a rather large spinning fibre stash in the meantime, and to be honest I also have quite a collection of commercial and handspun yarns I wanted to keep.

To make my life (and the move) a little easier I have therefore set myself the goal of not buying any new fibre until I basically have to, meaning I will try to actually spin away all the fibre I currently have. Phew. That's a goal. A big goal.

So whilst I am busily spinning my little heart away, I have also looked through my yarn stash and found a few things I will probably never have the time to work on, so I also added two lots of handspun destash to the shop, all wound into cute balls and ready to go.
Pictured is a lot of about 100g Wool/silk in a natural oatmeal/beige colour.

The other lot consists of 273g/9.6oz (!) of 2ply Merino wool in a tweedy shade of rainbow.

My goal is already asking for sacrifice: I am entirely out of my favourite fibre blend: Merino wool/Tussah silk. I still got a few braids of hand dyed Merino/silk but then that is it. And these are already mostly reserved for a big custom order. What this basically means is that the skein of 'Pearl' currently listed is my very last normal sized skein available. I have a few more odd skeins which I will probably list as one big very soon, but then that's it until I move.

At the moment I still got quite a bit of undyed Merino, lots of Alpaca and a great variety of more exotic fibres.

I cannot guarantee that prices will remain the same either, as some fibres seem quite a bit more expensive in the UK and I will have to do my best to find some good suppliers.

So basically, snap it up whilst it is here, because a lot of the yarns I am spinning now might not return after my move!

Wheat and honey handspun yarn and its inspiration

Today I will share one of my favourite, most random, places of inspiration.

Are you ready for this?

Ok: When spinning, I use a simple woolen 'leader thread' (the thread which is attached to the bobbin and onto which the first bit of the yarn is spun/attached). Whenever I take a yarn off the bobbin there is usually a little bit of fibre left on the leader thread. Some people cut these fibres off to have a clean leader thread again.... myself I like to leave it and let a whole bunch of fibre naturally accumulate around the end. I find the textures and colours very intrigueing!
Well, and on my current bobbin I kept seeing golden soy silk wrapped around a tweedy yellow yarn - and I liked it!

Yesterday I started recreating the look and here is 'wheat and honey' a respect-demanding bulky 2ply yarn handspun from golden soy silk and a tweedy batt consisting of yellow New Zealand wool and colourful cotton nepps (little 'freckles', if you will). The second picture shows the original inspiration.

What are you inspired by?