Monday 24 August 2009

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!

Thursday 13 August 2009

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.

Wednesday 5 August 2009

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. :)

Sunday 2 August 2009

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. :)