Knitting and Stitching Show

Another year, another Rhinebeck missed.  

While it is fun to have an extravagant shopping weekend at the fairgrounds, I miss the experience most of all.  Gathering with friends, seeing all the fantastic knitwear, being inspired by the colors of upstate New York autumn, the fantastic food, getting to pet lanolin-rich sheep and chatting with the farmers.  It's the ritual that I miss...summer is really over, now have some apples and lamb chili and cover yourself with wool.  

I slyly made my way up to Alexander Palace for the London Knitting and Stitching show last week.  Rhinebeck it was not, but I was hoping to recapture some of that spiritual feeling of autumn being here.  

Well, the weather screamed fall- lately, if it hasn't been a steady pour, it's been a wild windy ride of sun and rain, and lots of rainbows.   

Plus, I had wanted to get up to North London and check out the hilltop Ally Pally- a beautiful old convention center, crystal-palace style.  This hill is where the first TV broadcast signal in the world originated from!  

 Ah, and a touch of fall color.  There's very little of this here- leaves just turn brown unceremoniously and fall dead to the ground.

 And the city from afar:

 Inside, knits!

I don't know if I'd ever thought of knitting suet before, but someone surely has.

The show had all sorts of fibre artist- a lot of them had their booths set up as galleries and they had really amazing stuff.  Sculpture, multimedia, fashion...

The only thing I was really interested in was buying British wool.  It ended up being a tall order- there were many vendors there, and very few had nothing but commercially available yarn.

There were tons of fabric vendors.  I set out to buy fat quarters and some plain-ish jersey knit and ended up being overwhelmed by choice.  Any game plan in my head was quickly forgotten, and I walked away empty-handed.  

 Although some of the vendors need a bit help in the organizational department.

It seemed that the less organized a vendor was, the cheaper the prices were.  I watched in amusement as one discount yarn vendor had piled bags and bags of yarn into their booth....

In this hip-deep pile of yarn, people were scrambling for the centre, as if some magical yarn lived there.  As the pile spread further and further onto the floor, some worker would come by and shovel the yarn back into a stack.  Some people were literally swimming in the plasticky shifting pile, creating hazardous landslide conditions while searching for that elusive bargain.

Alas, Jameson's Shetland was there and the only cash I parted with that day was for a small kit of color-coordinated yarn for a fair isle hat.  They were just so nice!  Plus, Scotland.

So, aside from lacking the rustic aspect of being outdoors in the barns and pawing fleeces both on and off the sheep...

It was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Oh, and the food vending situation was awful.  Microwave pizza and pre-made sandwiches and rubbery pastries kind of awful that I stayed away from.  A quick check on my phone revealed that the neighborhood around Finsbury Park tube station had plenty of good Turkish restaurants, and I became the hero of the day for bring a bag of meze and kebaps in take-away bags back to South London.  It wasn't apple cidre donuts and lamb chili from the 4-h stand, but it was decidedly delicious.

Battier than a Belfry

Guess what?



I've updated my Etsy shop with MORE BATTS!





Scoop them up and spin yourself something awesome for fall! All of them are soft and well-blended. Most of the fiber I have hand dyed, and some of it is natural colored (Sheepy brown! Alpaca fawn!). A lot of work goes into each one, and they are completely unique. Some of these have merino, romney, bfl, alpaca, silk, bamboo, Leicester Longwool...really whatever I feel inspired by at the time.

This is the last of the batt updates for a while as I tucked the carder away, bundled up all my fiber and gave the house a good hoovering. I don't know how other batt-makers do it, but usually I end up with bits of fiber tracked all over the house. It seems like the alpaca is the most willing to travel and go places. It's hard to have a lot of company over with all this fluff flying around, and still appear somewhat normal to other people. I'm sure I'll be pulling the carder out again before the end of the year, if only for the selfish reason that I have a hankering to spin a rather gorgeous Rambouillet fleece.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/KnotMyDayJob

Felting

I recently took a class on wet felting. It's really super simple, and it has a lot of room for creativity. All you need is bubble wrap, soap and water, mosquito net, a rolling pin and wool. The only real problem is that it makes a mess- soap and water and slippery goop everywhere- so it might be a good outdoor picnic table project. I plan on getting one of those table cloths made out of plastic for my dining room table. You do need a pretty big surface area to do this (keep in mind anything you make will lose 30% of its length), and that's the only one I've got big enough.

Here's one of my FOs:



It's about 2 oz of handpainted corriedale roving. I laid it out in a loose, wavy grid on my bubble wrap. After the felting process, it actually becomes fabric, so it's much stronger than it looks.



It's really light and airy though. I did a few other pieces and experimented with density and color, but this is the one I like best.



It's also an excellent way to use up odd bits of roving. You don't need that much to begin with, but I made an interesting piece using bits of neps for texture.

I love the looks of a felted scarf, but if you sew, you can actually make garments out of your wet felt.

I found this basic guide online, but it's pretty dry...I'll plan on doing a photo tutorial soon.

FO- Snapdragon Tam

I started this on the plane back from Zurich. It took about a week to knit- it wasn't easy to memorize this pattern and the cables were pretty complex. It's PAY ATTENTION knitting.

Once I was done, two thing occurred to me.

1. Gauge swatches should have been made in the cable pattern, lest you want to end up with a feedbag for your head.
2. Very few people can pull of The Wearing of the Tam.

It ended up being huge. I threw it in the wash machine twice (I only have access to a front-loader, so it took the guesswork right out of the felting process) and then threw it in the drier for 10 minutes before taking it out and blocking it over a dinner plate and letting it dry on the radiator. The stitches tightened right up and the cables popped. Once it was dry, it was deemed wearable. Just not by me.



I used a bit over 2 skeins of Rowan Yorkshire Tweed, which is a discontinued dk weight yarn. It's a 2-ply yarn that is a bit undertwisted, so it wouldn't stand up to a lot of wear and tear.