What have our yarns become? Part 2

And here's another lovely item from Max - thank you so much! We can see that our yarns are in very good hands with you :-)

The Dark Ride

What have our yarns become? Part 1

The first reactions to our current promotion have arrived! We are thrilled to report that a customer provided us with photos of three (!) hats made from our yarns and hinted there were more projects still on the needles. We hope to get even more pictures later on. :-)

Here Comes the Rain Again

The Fat Lady's Dress

Walk Like an Egyptian


Aren't they lovely? Great work, and thank you very much, Max!

*10% off your next purchase!*

We'd like to show the world what our customers - you! - make from our yarn. Some of you have already shown us some photos and we love to see what each and every skein becomes after leaving us. Especially since it is always hard (and sometimes very hard!) to part with our handspun.

So we have decided to give special discount to those of our customers who send us pictures of the items made from our yarn and allow us to show them to the world.

In short:
- Send us one or more (good) photos of what you made from our yarn and allow us to put it on display on our blog (our email adress is info224@566weirdandtwisted.com - please remove all numbers before sending!)
- If you have a blog or homepage and want us to link to you when we show your picture(s), please specify
- Get 10% off your next order!

If you have processed more than one of our yarns, we'd love to see more photos ;-) In that case, you will not only get 10% off your next order, but two free stitch markers for every item (other than the first) you send us a photo of.

This special offer runs until June 30th, so: Send us your photos until that date and place your order qualifying for special discount any time (after having sent said photos) until the end of this year!

We hope to see lots of photos! :-)

Spinning Outside

After having hardly ever touched a spindle for about a year (to be precise: since I got my spinning wheels ;-)) I take -again- great pleasure in spinning outside or in my favourite café. As mentioned, I took the Adamantium batt with me today - and here you can witness some work in progress:


We (that is to say: my fiancée and I) spend the afternoon in Ladenburg, a pretty (and partly medieval) town near Heidelberg, and we had coffee at the river Neckar. I abstained from eating cake and took out batt and spindle instead.
I might start taking photos whenever spinning outside (or anywhere but at home, for that matter) and showing them here - I kind of like the idea of a spinning gallery with different backgrounds ;-)

The yarn looks great, I think - though a bit too furry for metal, strictly speaking. But I am somewhat limited there, seeing that I want to make yarn *g* The batt consists of grey alpaca, grey bamboo, a small amount of pale blue silk (hand dyed) and lots of aluminium and steel angelina. It is wonderfully soft and noble.

X-Men Batts

Just a quick peek before I hit the road:

Adamantium

Rogue

I'll take Adamantium with me, maybe I'll get lucky and find some time to spin it :-)

The Dark Side

I have already mentioned one of my new yarns - the one I'll probably have to keep, since I am very much in love with it (and it would have to be so expensive that no one would buy it, anyway ;-)). It has been spun from handcarded batts of black alpaca fibre, hand dyed merino/silk blend of a subtle, blueish grey, shiny white bamboo and silver angelina. I used the corespinning technique again (spinning the fibres around a core thread with an angle of (mostly) 90 degrees), which is probably the most time-consuming spinning technique - with the exeption of supercoils. In the end, I had 150 m/104 g of the most gorgeous yarn I can imagine. It cost me a lot of time, but was very well worth it! But let me tell you a bit more ;-) Apart from the bone skulls I've spun in, there are also various semi-precious stones and other fancy stuff: iolite discs that match the merino/silk blend, lava beads, drops of labradorite and freshwater pearls of dark red. I've seldomly used such a large amount of embellishments.

And nooooooow.... Photos!




A few more photos can be seen on my flickr page.

There is only one problem with me and this yarn: I have no idea (yet) what to make from it. Somehow, I don't want another scarf (I have too many already, I can't wear them all and end up with my favourite one, which is all right, surely, but then I don't need any others - and if I made a scarf from this yarn, I couldn't wear my now-favourite one, since the new one would be even better. You can see my dilemma, I am sure ;-)), somehow a hat seems to be to mundane for this beauty (and I don't much like wearing hats, anyway) and I have no further ideas. I will have to forage for ideas and patterns on ravelry. With 150 m I will be somewhat limited, but I am sure I will find something in the end.
Another problem is that the yarn will be gone as soon as I've knitted it up - which is normal, and I know I am acting silly. But what if I knit it up into something and then I find a better use later? I suppose that's why knitters accumulate so many yarns; there has to be the perfect project for a specific yarn and until you find the right one, you have to knit something else ;-)

It really glows!

Remember the glowing stuff I wrote about? I used some of the thread for the yarn you see here. It's called "Marine Phosphorescence" and - as you can see - it does glow in the dark.

I was lucky to witness real marine phosphorescence once or twice (years ago) and it was absolutely stunning and soooo beautiful! It started on our last evening in England, where we had spent our summer holidays, and continued when we were going back to Germany. So I was able to see it both at the beach and from the ship. It was slightly eerie and unbelievably wonderful...

This yarn will be listed in our Etsy shop soon.


(Edit: I've added another picture to show the yarn in daylight - thanks to GrannyWeatherwax for reminding me! More pictures can be seen on my flickr-Page.)

Daily Madness

I am currently spending my time...






...at work:
an excavation near Ludwigshafen, Germany









(we've recently got some new sunshades, which is a good thing regarding the oncoming summer and my heat-sensitivity)

...learning Swedish
(due to University requirements, but it's also great fun - though I wish I had more time to practice...)



...translating (supposedly) Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs (which tend to be not exactly from that time period, which makes translating a lot more difficult). This is what costs me most of my time, so I can't say I'm really thrilled...

...and waiting for the semester to be over
(secretly hoping that spinning time will increase afterwards)

I also have some good news, though: I had a nearly-free weekend and got some spinning done. The skull-y yarn is ready to be put in the shop and I've made another yarn with skulls - which might be the most gorgeous yarn I've ever spun and which I might not be able to sell or give away - but I'll have to postpone writing about that. Now the hieroglyphs await ;-)

Skull-y

Work in progress:
carded batts of alpaca, silk, linen/flax, angelina, corespun with added red glass beads and bone skulls.



I LOVE it! This will be another yarn I'll have problems to part with...

Can't wait for Halloween

You might ask why that is. Well, I'm about to tell you ;-)
We've finally managed - after nearly a year of searching! So we will keep our secret ;-) - to get our hands onto some glow-in-the-dark fibre!!!


We're quite excited about it, and maybe we'll just start spinning new Halloween yarns early this year. After all, those of you who want to use them will need enough time to knit them up, won't you? ;-)
Although glow-in-the-dark stuff isn't unique to Halloween, we are inclined to use that fibre mostly for Halloween yarns - and we do like that holiday, anyway.

I haven't yet tried to spin some of that splendid stuff, but I've carded some together with bamboo and hand dyed red and orange lambs wool:


I will probably need some time to experiment with the amount I need for a nice glowing effect. Lucky there's still time ;-)

Ahh - while I was writing this posting, the postman delivered more glowing stuff! Commercial yarn we'll spin in or use for thread-plying. YAY!

Here's to the other half of the world

You might have noticed that our winter collection has dwindled quite a lot and that we've been busy spinning spring and summer yarns. We've been overjoyed about the weather getting warmer, since we've had enough of cold and rainy days - which is what winter is, here. However, we've remembered that the seasons are not the same all over the world and have therefore decided to expand our winter collection again, for all of you who are still expecting winter, for those of you who just like winter, and, of course, for all of you who just like our winter collection ;-)

The fibre for this yarn has been carded with the help of our wonderful, new drum carder and the yarn itself will be listed in our shop soon :-)