Pooped and Penniless!

I think it will take me a week to recover! But Woolfest was a fab few days!

My dear hubby took me and the caravan over on Wednesday evening. It was a glorious drive over, the shadows on the hills were so beautiful.

We arrived at Graysonside and as we set the caravan up we got the feeling we were being watched!

On Thursday, I spent a quiet day, knitting, spinning and reading! Bliss!! But as the day went on, the weather started to change, becoming wetter and windier by the minute. It got so bad that a nearby tent actually blew over and was rescued by some hardy souls!

It was quite scary, as the caravan was rocking violently. I was so pleased to see Carrie Anne, Becky and Bev!! As Andrea wasn't able to make it, we decided not to put up the tent and just squeeze into the caravan. This is a pic of the four of us.

On Friday and Saturday, we started with a hearty farmhouse breakfast, well worth staying at Graysonside for alone! On very full stomachs, and with a lot of excitement, we went to Woolfest!!

As last year, it was an amazing combination of animals, fibres, equipment and wonderful people. I met many people who I only knew through Blogland and it was brill to put faces to the names. The first bloggers I met were the wonderful Artis-Anne and her fab daughter Kath. It really made my weekend meeting these two warm and friendly ladies. It felt as though we 'clicked' straight away, as though we'd known each other for years!!

On Friday and Saturday morning, I spent the day shopping, while on Saturday afternoon I attended the Artic Lace workshop with Carrie Anne. This was really interesting, learning about the Eskimos of Alaska and their use of musk oxen hair ( is it spelt quivert?) in knitting.

I mainly bought fibre, including Shetland, Blue Faced Leicester, Ryeland and Gotland fleece.

This pic shows the dark Gotland as well as the golden and smokey Angora from those gorgeous bunnies! There's also some Suri alpaca in there too!

I also got a couple of extra bobbins, for all that spinning I'm going to do and a niddy noddy.

I really would like to try some more dyeing, so I bought some Procion dyes from DT crafts and some natural dyes from Pure Tinctoria. The undyed yarn is in sock and lace weight.

And finally I bought some reading material, some Spin Off mags, a book on natural dyeing and a kit from Natural Dye Studio, to crochet a mohair scarf! Gulp! It seems to be simple crochet, so fingers crossed!

So all in all, a fantastic few days. And to top it all off, I won Kaths Krafty Kreations blog prize! Thanks Kath!! It came with a challenge, which I'll post about next time. So here we are worn out and skint, but very, very happy!! Thanks to the rest of my caravan comrades for a fab time! Shall I book up for next year??

Dyeing Day.

What a fab day I had when Acrylik invited me to play!! Dyeing yarn is something thats been on my 'to do' list for a long time, but as with most crafters, there just never seems to be enough time to try everything. So when Carrie Anne asked me if I wanted to join her and try dyeing yarn, I had my pinny on before you could say niddy noddy!

We prepared all the ingredients ready for dyeing. Carrie Anne explains this really well, so I'd take a look at her Acrylik blog to get the details.

Putting the first colour on was exciting, and I think I got a bit carried away with dyes on the first skein! I was definitely a bit 'heavy handed' especially with the blue dye!

I just had to add a bit of red to the mixture and sloshed ,., I mean carefully placed a bit around the skein!

This is how it first looked, but after a few minutes, the colours became more muted. When I bought the spinning wheel, the lazy kate had yarn on the bobbins, so I plied this up and this was the yarn I used for the first attempt. It still had a lot of grease on it and was goodness knows how old. I don't know if this was why the colours were more muted, perhaps someone with much more dyeing experience can tell me why. As you can see in the next pic, the colours changed dramatically, and a little more colour rinsed out, though not a huge amount. I quite liked these earthy shades. The mix of olive, terracotta and muted yellow was beautiful.

The next skein I tried, I was much more controlled with the dyes! I still had to use all 3 dyes though! The result was much more vibrant on this yarn. It was one I'd bought from DT Crafts at Woolfest, a DK 100% wool. There was no dye at all in the rinse of this yarn and the colours stayed true.

We had such fun documenting each others attempts, and did get a bit silly at times, as you can see from the next photo! The incredible bearded lady!

I was really pleased with the finished results. The yarns look so different its hard to believe that the same 3 dye colours were used on both! So here are the finished articles, ready to use.

As I said before, I've skimmed over the process, so do please read Acrylik's blog. I really do wish I'd tried before as it was not as complex as I'd thought. As messy?.......yup!

I've still got a red thumb! Wonder if Carrie Anne's fingers are still purple?!