Hello autumn! And say hello to my new handspun freeform crochet hats!

Hello! It's time for my quarterly blog post! ;P

I know the rest of the world has been struggling with a heat wave, but not so in the UK, so despite the fact that it is only late August, I'm already completely in autumn mode and have started wearing more layers of scarves and other woolens...

This year I am really and truly excited, because after years of planning and quietly crafting, I am finally able to present a brand new item in my little etsy shop! Over the coming weeks there will be plenty of hats presenting themselves. They stem from my desire to create something beautiful out of some of my handspun yarns, which were just too labour intensive or to small to make it into the shop as yarns... Many of these hats feature some of my favourite ever yarns and lots of different art yarns with beads and other trinkets!

All of them are handmade by me using the finest yarns. To give more choice there will be two lines:
1 - the all handspun, lots of art yarns, way over the top hat designs
2 - slightly simpler designs reminiscent of 1920s cloche designs featuring handspun yarns as well as Noro Kochoran, a commercially spun high end colour transitioning yarn with lots of snuggly angora combined with wool and silk. (See the sneak peek below)

Both are intended to be showstoppers and true works of wearable art! It helps that they're also so cosy and warm - I know I'll be wearing mine all winter. :)

Anyway, they'll be coming soon, so keep an eye out for them!

My spin along yarn :)

Yeah, that spin along....

Well, I had a bit of an issue, I went to charge the battery in my camera, put it back in and suddenly it stopped working! I loved that camera! Anyway, got myself a new one now, fancier of course and I really like it as well.

Sooooo, without further ado, I present to you my Lai Grai SAL yarn:

I've joined a spin along...

...and it's time to get my art yarn mojo back in action! I've joined the most recent of Laila's amazing spin alongs over on Lai Grai's ravelry group, where some of my most favourite spinners hang out!
First off I received a goodie pack containing a textured batt and lots of little trinkets. The theme was 'vintage', so I knew straight away that it was one I had to join! There were some extra fibres, silk cocoons, ribbons, fabric strips, wooden beads, beautiful linen thread....

From the beginning I planned on carding up some more fibre myself to beef up my skein, so I went ahead and dug up some matching fibres - I am due to do some dyeing, so my choices were a little limited, but to 'vintage' I can always mix something together. :) The batt in the front is Laila's gorgeous piece, the two simpler ones out back are my additions.

The last picture shows the pieces I decided to include in the yarn, threaded and ready to go. I mixed in some bling in the form of golden sequins, golden ric rac and matte golden glass beads threaded in groups of 7 onto Laila's linen thread.

Pictures of the finished yarn coming soon!!

First art exhibition!!

I don't really know where to start, so let's just say I am sooooooo incredibly excited about having my work exhibited in the gorgeous Hotel Hadley Studios in North Carolina! :)

The exhibition features a whole variety of fibre artists and is called 'Gay for eagles'. It explores themes of gender, sexuality, war and peace.

If you are in the area at all, it will be open from the 15th of April to the 14th of May and you should definitely stop by!

The picture shows a close-up of one of my contributions; I created several pieces of embroidery featuring art yarns I spun specifically for this exhibition.

A big THANK YOU goes out to the amazing Drucilla Pettibone for organising this!

Grapefruits and limes....

...back in the swing of things and happily listing more items in my little shop!
My latest yarn is called 'grapefruits and limes' with more of lilley's beautiful beads.

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!

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.

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 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 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!

'Earth Goddess' handspun yarn WIP

My latest yarn is called Earth Goddess and features just about everything nice and brown. Oh, except, I ended up not using the ricrac, as it would have made the yarn too stiff. But I did use hand dyed soft wool, sequins, embroidered cotton fabric, Angelina (sparkle) and a beautiful linen/cotton tweedy thread to ply. I also used some Tunesian wool and Karakul wool, which are both rougher wools, but with a very intrigueing range of colours.

Lady Gaga art yarn

Sometimes I get inspired by the weirdest things, but this time I surprised myself. :D
The pop/dance singer Lady Gaga has been the inspiration behind this latest art yarn. I just find it intriguing how she makes herself into a piece of art and how she uses style to create her own identity. Her music is kind of catchy as well, although I wouldn't like to admit that, lol.

For this yarn I grabbed fibres in black, white, metallic light blue and added blonde goat fibre for her hair (nothing personal, but it does look exactly like it!). I also strung matching beads on a sparkle thread and added sequins and ric rac. The result is a yarn I could easily see her use in her stage wear (apparently she makes a lot of it herself), but it also incorporates her whole look in one skein, which is pretty amazing.

Even if you have never heard of her though this yarn is a bit of a stunner. :P

Baby Alpaca yarn

The other day I washed a batch of Alpaca. The finest, snuggliest baby Alpaca, to be precise. This is the Alpaca from this local farm I wrote about a while back. The colour of the fibre is called Rose grey and is basically a light grey with beautiful brown tips. The resulting yarn has a really nice mélange of colours. The first picture shows the washed fibre - it took me 6 washes before the water was reasonably clear, washing your fibre is really quite time consuming! The second picture shows the rolags I carded on my hand carders. I mixed in some hand dyed Merino/silk, pure tussah silk, Angora fibre and hand dyed silk noil to achieve the look you can see on the yarn in the third picture. The finished yarn has been wrapped in a bouclé thread and also has big transparent rocaille glass beads spun in.

I carded some more of this Alpaca fibre with Angelina and more hand dyed Merino/silk to spin a really sweet 2ply yarn from it, but it is currently being washed, so no pictures yet. :)

Elegant grey art yarn WIP

My latest art yarn is handspun from natural grey Alpaca/Tussah silk with dark grey sequins and real freshwater pearls in matching colours. It might well be one of my most elegant yarns to date and I will soon be able to post pictures of the finished yarn. Here is what went into it:

Strawberry cheesecake art yarn

After a short vacation in the UK, I am back with some exciting new fibres and sequins! :D
I am also getting around to updating my shop with a few pretty yarns I have recently spun up,
Pictured here is 'Strawberry cheesecake', a vegan art yarn handspun from pink linen and natural golden soy silk, to which I added lots of pearl beads in different colours and sizes.

Something else that has been going on was my participation in the new yarn sampler box, Phat fiber and I also received my very own box! It was great fun looking through the different samples, and as there was a theme for the month they should also work out into something pretty if combined.

Right now I am finishing off some more soy silk wrist warmers, some of those 'almost-but-not-quite' finished projects for a while... the new batch looks so stunning and it really got me into the mood of knitting even more of them - they are so addictive!

More tweed!

Well, apparently another tweed yarn got into the shop first, it's a tweed yarn with pearls.

This one is spun from a blended wool mix in red and green, giving the finished yarn an almost even, rusty brown colour. Exactly this 'almost' makes for such an interesting tweedy texture. There are lots of coppery/olive/golden pearls spun in as well for some extra glamour!

Over the weekend I was able to take some more good pictures of yarns to come, so they will get listed over the course of next week.
I am itching to create some more tweed inspired yarns I got in mind, more on this soon. :)

I want candy, finally finished this handspun yarn!

Some people might remember my post about a yarn called 'I want candy' - well, it has been finished and is now available as a big skein and a smaller skein. It is handspun entirely from hand dyed wool scraps and looks quite delightful. As there are two skeins available, this would definitely be enough for a nice project. I would love to see how this knits up and am actually quite tempted to take it out of the shop again... but I do have a policy that I will have to put one of my other 'keepers' into the shop if I want to keep another one - and I love them all, haha.

Other than that I have just finished a really fun yarn corespun from hand dyed Mohair locks. It is so soft and fluffy and due to its bright colours I called it 'Samba'. So far I have spun two skeins of this and it is so addictive! However right now I got caught up in spinning for quite a few custom orders, which I love to do. Especially my soy silk seems to be pretty popular at the moment - I even had to order more despite my last pretty chunky order, lol.

This weekend will see a lot of spinning. I am actually working on a completely gorgeous custom order of a new style which I might include in the shop in future, it is just so gorgeous! Also, there are still plenty of yarns to be listed and two interesting art yarns I have to take pictures of first. :)

Brown leaves art yarn

My brown leaves art yarn had been finished for quite some time already, but first I struggled with rainy days and then... hmmm.... something. :D
The yarn is hand dyed wool with green glass beads, shiny leaf sequins and copper Angelina sparkle spun in.
On another note I have recently been featured by Amy from Pretty Lil Stars, have a look here. She knits lots of neckwarmers available in her shop as well as some bright jewellery and some fun items made from old vinyl records!

Pictures of my 'I want candy' yarn will be up soon and I also received some more fun beads in the mail today, which will soon appear in some more yarns. Right now I am just working on a corespun yarn from some hand dyed Merino I never dared using as it is just so pretty. Pastel prettyness. :D

Darling WIP

Time for another sweet art yarn.... pictures of the brown leaves art yarn will follow shortly. Here we have the beads and sequins for 'darling'. There are also some rose quartz chips for a little bit of pink. The fibre is mainly white, hand-processed Alpaca carded together with some hand dyed organic falkland wool, Tussah silk and many other white-ish fibres.
My most recent yarn to go into the shop is autumn tweed, a soft Merino yarn inspired by the seasonal changes around me: