29 July: A Wednesday Walk

Another in the occasional series of walks - this one was in Weardale, starting from Wolsingham. The route took in Tunstall Reservoir, seen here to the right of the dam -


The water level had been low for long enough that plants had grown round the overflow area -

The weather was fairly kind, just a few drops of rain (the magic overtrousers needed only to be carried); we had an excellent picnic lunch, eaten as we sat on rocks and contemplated the rain clouds at the bottom end of the dale; and the route provided plenty of interest and a few challenges, as well as wonderful views.

We returned to tea and birthday cake, a good hot soak and a lie down.

27 July: Holiday socks

Socks are a good project to take away on holiday - simple, portable, and small. Here are 2 pairs from our recent trips, finished at home-


For my Dear Husband, absolutely plain and in manly colours from the Yarn Yard, bought at the Woolfest, these socks replace some older ones which are now past it.

24 July: Catching up

Recent projects have mostly been rather uninteresting to photograph - spinning fleece mostly, but there have been a few small items now rounded up into a picture -


There are some inkle bands - two narrow ones done on the old loom, and the green/blue one done on the new moon loom. The ball of off-white yarn is spun from an Estonian batt from Wingham at Woolfest (I spun that one evening when bored with Le Tour), the dull purple sock yarn is from the Yarn Yard - a plain sock in progress for my Dear Husband - and the beaded row counters were made very quickly, after seeing something about them on Ravelry, and finding the instructions on eHow; I tried out various wooden and glass beads, and several different types of yarn.

Then yesterday I was reorganising my archery stuff, and decided to make a cloth bag for my recurve bow, so that I can carry it in one piece, rather than keep on taking it to bits and re-assembling it every time I use it. The piece of fabric in the box that was large enough also happens to be bright red, and made of microfibre. It is, therefore, very tough. It had also been in the fabric box for about 25 years, since I bought it in Peterlee when I was working over there.

Anyway, last time the sewing machine was used, there was a problem with the tension, so I decided to sew this by hand. It was hard work, but at least there's the feeling that it's done satisfactorily.The tie is a narrow inkle band, originally an experiment for shoelaces, but I failed to get the ends narrow enough to thread them through the lace-holes. Still, it's just right for this purpose!


One and a half fleeces have been spun, and some of the resulting yarn has been woven and is now waiting to be made up into the planned bags - more experiments.

14 July: Summer in the city

Our recent short trip Down South included a glorious walk in the Weald (the clegs down there bite just as hard as up here), a visit to Penshurst Place, and on the hottest day of the year, a trip into London to see the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

While many of the exhibits left me thinking of the Emperor's New Clothes, there were a couple of dozen I actually liked, and even one or two I might have been able to stand on the walls at home - if the walls were big enough, that is. Many of the pictures were enormous. So were many prices.

I was intrigued to see that nearly all the artists, who evidently strive to be individual in their work, are completely uniform in the rectangular format; the few non-rectangular pieces were generally much more interesting.

As well as paintings and sculptures/assemblages, there were books (interesting) and architectural models (mostly very boring); and photographs, mostly interesting, though personally I found it slightly irritating that David Hockney didn't stand in exactly the same place every time he photographed The Twenty Five Trees etc.

Of course, with so many items to display, not all of them get a good position - two of my favourites were quite difficult to see properly - one was a huge collage of Babel Towers, which was partly obscured by a gigantic gorilla made of coat hangers, and another was a photo of a Northumberland Beach, which was high up above the end of a wall where a film was being projected.

I was able to knit on the train home yesterday, getting part way up the leg of the second of a pair of socks for my Dear Husband. Now I must get back to the fleece that was being spun before our trip; 6 skeins done already and 2 or 3 more to do.

5 July: The new inkle loom

Last night it had to be done - try out the new inkle loom, made by Michael Williams and collected from the Woolfest.

The yarn is a ball of merino/tencel sock yarn from the stash which will never be socks, and which will probably make a very nice little woven pouch. There are 71 warp threads , and plenty of width left for a wider band. Not all the pegs are used for this band.


I find it's a bit high to work at when it's on the table, but it will fit on my lap, resting against the table at the back, and that is very comfortable. The warp is moved on quite easily; the shed is not as wide (high?) as on my Ashford inkle loom, but I expect I'll get used to that.

So now there's a weaving project started, as well as 2 knitting projects, and a Hebridean fleece partly spun. And Le Tour has started. What a good thing I don't have to go out to work any more!

28 June: Lake District part 2 - Woolfest

One of the reasons for our week in the Lake District was to visit Woolfest for a little stocking up on fibre and fibre-related items.


I collected my new inkle loom from Michael Williams - isn't it gorgeous? Really substantial, made from oak and maple.

There is the usual assortment of sock yarn, undyed and dyed from the Yarn Yard (I wound it into balls when we got home), some batts and "wild fibre" from Wingham, and some plain white fibre from P & M to blend it into, a lucet with bobbin from Ziggy Rytka (who was later spotted playing a hurdy-gurdy in the music area), a circular knitting needle, some buttons, and a book.

Oh, and 2 Shetland fleeces, straight from the sheep-owner. After my adverse experience with fleece when a novice spinner, I have avoided it and used prepared fibres, but these fleeces are so lovely that I decided it was time to have another try.

Then yesterday I was demonstrating spinning at an event which included sheep-shearing, and seem to have come home with a further 2 and a half fleeces - the half because 2 of us liked that particular grey colour. The grey and one black one are Shetland and the other black one is Hebridean.

The rest of today I shall be in the garden, combing and spinning fleece.

27 June: Lake District

The weather was glorious in the Lake District all week, with farmers making hay in every valley.
We were staying near Tarn Hows, so that was part of our first day's walking -


Another day we walked from Hawkshead over Latterbarrow to Lake Windermere, then returned up through the woods of Claife and across fields. This peaceful-looking lunch spot was actually beside a path popular with walkers and cyclists.


This was near Coniston - again, admiring the fells from the valley below -


Another walk in the woods, another attack by clegs; this time Grizedale Forest, with its sculptures.


See how it comes back round to sheep and wool again? Of course, Friday was spent at the Woolfest in Cockermouth, where I collected my Michael Williams inkle loom, and bought a quantity of tools and fibre, including 2 Shetland fleeces! Dipping a toe into fleece preparation again, this time with a bit more idea of what I'm doing.

13 June: World Championship

Today we competed in the Fifth World Wand Championship at Raby Castle, a longbow competition. It rained. The morning was taken up with the Championship itself - 13 ends of 3 arrows each, shot from various distances from 20 yards to 50 yards.

This is the set-up before shooting started -


The wands are 4 inches wide and the scoring area is about 40 inches top to bottom. The winner scored 18 hits, and was presented with the magnificent silver trophy. My Dear Husband and I did not distinguish ourselves, nor did we disgrace ourselves; we enjoyed both the shooting and meeting friendly archers from other clubs, some of whom we met at the last shoot at Raby.

The Castle made a scenic backdrop to the event, and the staff laid on an excellent lunch for us.


After lunch we had first a proper wand shoot, with everyone trying to hit inch wide and about 3 feet tall sticks stuck into the ground, from a distance of about 25 yards; there were a surprising number of hits.

Then it was the sudden death competition, in which everyone shot an end at 20 yards, then non-scorers dropped out and scorers went on to shoot at 30 yards; repeat at increasing distances until there is only one archer left. This took a while, as it reached a point where the few left in the competition all missed, and then there were several more ends needed to decide the second and third places.

It took far less time to dismantle and pack up the wet equipment than it had done to set it all out in the morning, then we came home to dry out our own kit and have a nice lie down after all the excitement.

6 June: Back to the wool

A few more inkle bands have been woven - here are two of them in use securing my carders -


Recent spinning has included a bag of wool/linen , which was not very easy to spin, but which has an interesting texture. It has now been dyed and wound into balls, ready for making into something or other.


More spinning, this time a bag of Jamieson and Smith's Shetland fibre in a range of 14 different shades. About 25 gms in each little skein, about 20 w.p.i.

And then yesterday was spent demonstrating spinning with the Guild at a local Medieval Fair - a sure sign of summer. Unfortunately, I have no photos.

28 May: Bike race

Yesterday evening we went into Durham to see the bike race. It was a short circuit of about a mile, with 10 teams of five riders hurtling round for over an hour.

Many people were watching by the nasty corner at the bottom of South Street -


- with a backdrop of the Castle.

At the top of the steep part, none of the riders were looking to their left, at the Cathedral across the river.


On the other side of the circuit, there were fewer spectators, but just as many barriers. This was the leading group, who lapped lots of the slower riders.


There were more crowds along the finish straight, by Durham School, although the PA was deafening.

The oldest rider won; if you want to see it all, it's on ITV4 tonight (Friday).

17 May: More knitting and weaving

This neckwarmer is knitted in a stitch shown to me by a fellow Guild member - but her instructions were in French, and it took a while to identify the same stitch with English instructions.


The yarn is handspun and home-dyed BFL, and both stitch and yarn are very good for a thick soft yummy scarf.

Back to the inkles. These two are plain weave, but with varied yarns. The broad one is some multi-colour scraps of merino, and the narrow one is Suffolk and BFL.


Two more pick-up patterns. It's a bit annoying to find a small mistake in the weaving on practically every band, but I suppose few of us are actually perfect....

8 May: Playing with patterns

Pattern + colour = great fun.

Next in the exploration of woven bands is this double chevron one -

woven in handspun Shetland yarns, 2 inches wide.

Then there's these 2 zigzag ones, different colour combinations but the same pattern -


Handspun yarns again, each band is an inch and a quarter wide. Both sides of all the bands are shown - the patterns are reversed on the back.

This next one, though only an inch and a half wide, needed a lot of threads, and the finest yarn in the stash is mill-spun. When used together with handspun, they seem to snag against each other - anyway, the weaving was "sticky", and the shed had to be coaxed open all the way along (including acres of unpicking and re-weaving.....);


but it's turned out very well, and the two small mistakes in the weaving aren't noticeable on the front. (It was only as the wrong side passed along under the loom that they became apparent - much too late to unpick.)

And then a first attempt at putting different patterns together - as a bit of light relief after the last one, they are all very easy patterns.


This one's got some sock yarn (home-dyed) along with the handspun Shetland and Black Wensleydale yarns, and it's an inch and a half wide. The photo doesn't show clearly that the striped border is yellow and brown, while the spotted border is green and brown.

5 May: Broken specs

This morning, as I sat down to browse the Interweb, I took my specs off - not needed for the computer - and they fell apart.

It looked as if the metal prongs holding the soft bit that goes over my nose had snapped away from the frame. I found my spare pair and wore them all day, thinking I would have to go and buy some new frames - an expense I wasn't planning on this month.

Then just now, when I'd hunted about and found my last prescription, I had another look at the broken specs, through the lenses of the spare pair, and spotted that there were tiny screws in the soft-bit-that-goes-over-my nose. The screws had simply come unscrewed! Half a minute with a tiny screwdriver, and I've just saved myself a few hundred pounds! I think I'll go and order some Shetland tops instead.

30 April: A cunning plan

There are now lots of inkles piled up in my playroom workroom.

So it seemed a good idea to make something from them. Like a bag. After fiddling about with ways of constructing a bag without having to hem too many ends, I worked out a sort of spiral, which forms a lop-sided tube; still needed to join the long sides together, and several ways of finishing the ends were considered before I chose to hem the narrow end at the bottom, and finish the top end by passing the cut threads through the weaving and braiding them on the front.

I had to cut the narrow inkle and stitch it to make the loops, though.


The bag is about 8" wide and 7" high with the top folded over. And at last I found a use for a boxwood acorn cut off a roller blind over 30 years ago - I knew it would come in handy one day!

The idea is that the sash will be simply knotted round me, and the bag is big enough for the essentials, while the clip can take keys if needed. The sash could also be knotted shorter, to make it a shoulder-bag or an across-the-body bag. Will the theory work out in practice?

23 April: Inkling on

- which sounds like something P.G.Wodehouse might have written.

The guild library last week yielded a small book called "Inkle Weaving" by Lavinia Bradley. It has a slightly different approach from my other books on the topic. One was to use up all those short bits of yarn that get thrown into a bag as too big to throw away, but too small to make anything with. They are simply knotted together and used to warp up the inkle loom - the knots get woven into the band, and an interesting texture and colour results -

The chapter titled "Bolivian Pebble Weave" looked interesting. The technique is illustrated by a typically South American Navajo design (!), which I wove in handspun BFL .

The suggestion in the book was that the technique could be adapted to produce more English designs like Christmas trees, horses and dogs.

I tried making up a meander-type design, but I don't think it's successful, either in the sugared-almond colours of BFL, or in the sludge colours of sock yarn -


Then, using the "Baltic-style" warping (one thick pattern thread followed by two thin background threads), I wove some handspun Shetland into a chevron pattern inkle which I love -


To make the pattern threads thicker, I needed 2 strands of yarn; as there was only one ball of each colour, I put a blue strand and a green strand together. It was dead easy to weave, the yarn was good to work with, and the finished band is very satisfying. There may be more.

(What do I mean, "may"?)

21 April: Wednesday Walk in Hamsterley Forest

Bright and sunny, though still a bit chilly, today, so off we went to Hamsterley Forest for one of our regular walks.

This tree looked as if it was draped with velvet -


- and this plant growing strongly beside the path surprised us -


I think it's skunk cabbage, but it's not listed in my usual handbook of British wild flowers, so I'm not really sure.

Down by the river, many of the trees have had the ground eroded away from around their roots -


The river itself was quiet today, as was the Forest - we saw only a few people, and those mostly in the car park.

18 April: Spring

The lawn has had its first cut of the year. Some flower seeds have been sown in pots and trays, and two or three plants that seem not to have survived the winter have been threatened - start putting out shoots, or go straight to the compost heap, do not pass Go, etc.

There's been time for some inkle weaving -

These are all in handspun wool, 3 plain weave bands and one, the green and yellow one in merino, a very time-consuming pick-up pattern which makes it the same on both sides.

That one was still in progress when I went to the Guild's monthly workshop day; out of less than a dozen people there, 3 of us were working on inkles! Must be something in the air (apart from volcanic ash, of course).

And a parcel of fibre came from Wingham Wool Works, some merino/tencel blend, some wool/linen blend, and 3 little Estonian wool batts. So far I have spun up one of the Estonian batts and a bit of the wool/linen, which is quite heavily textured - that's "lumpy" viewed from the other side. Not sure what they might be used for, perhaps an inkle or two?

But with the lighter evenings, archery has moved out of the sports halls and onto the playing fields. After shooting at 25 yards all winter, it's wonderful to have a target a hundred yards away. And this week the summer schedule starts, with shooting 3 times a week instead of twice.

11 April: Inkle exploration

The low-tech weaving has shifted into inkle-weaving. (For those with no inkling about that, an inkle is a narrow woven band, in the shoe-lace to cummerbund width range.)


The pink and grey wool one at the top is woven to a design by Laverne at Backstrap Weaving - she took the pattern from a yurt band and wove it on her backstrap loom; my version was done on an inkle loom.

The lavender and gray interlaced pattern is another one woven in my handspun wool on the inkle loom.

The pile sample was woven on my backstrap loom, with a warp of handspun linen and pile knotted on in rug wool. Different spacings and pile lengths were explored, before I decided that life is probably too short to go any further with this. At least it shows it can be done on a backstrap loom.

The green and cream interlaced pattern one is done in cotton in 2 thicknesses. This pattern needed a lot of concentration, and even after unpicking several bits (and several times too!), there are mistakes in the weaving.

The bottom band is woven on the inkle loom in mill-spun Shetland wool (spun in Shetland), and was an attempt to finish up a bagful of leftover small skeins. The warp threads clung to each other, and opening every shed was an effort, but the finished band is worth it - lovely subtle colours and a solid feel, and at over 2 inches wide and 6 feet 3 inches long, a useful size. In fact I like it so much, I think I'll go and make another one.

6 April: Wednesday walk on Tuesday

Today we did something we'd spoken about idly several times since getting the Bus Passes - we took the bus from the end of our street, got off at a convenient place for coffee and a bun, then walked home. It took less than 2 and a half hours.

We managed to walk down one path we've never been along before, and found that another track through the woods has been repaired and a footbridge improved since we last came that way.

We walked through fields where skylarks were flying up on both sides, singing as they hung on the breeze. The bumble bees are just emerging this week, too, so spring is really under way.

Crossing this field, we wondered if we were missing something -


- but there was no invisible fence. It might have been a magic stile, the entrance to another world. We went round it, just in case.

2 April: Gardening begins

The event that really marks the start of the gardening season is -

digging out the compost bin!

Which was done this morning, much to the delight of one robin, who actually dared to come into the garden while I was there (very unusual for our local robins), and later on a varied selection of dunnocks, blackbirds, tits and chaffinches.

It is clear that eggshells don't biodegrade as quickly as expected, though the little red worms cluster round them even more thickly than other compost components - we seem to have a very healthy and growing population of little red worms.

The first primroses are coming out, yellow as well as purple, and the hellebores are doing well -


- and the miniature daffs are at their best -