Today, I'm sad

Some time ago, a fellow spinner and I agreed to a trade: she would send me a handmade spindle and I would spin her some custom art yarn. I was so looking forward to receiving the spindle, having seen pictures beforehand.
Today I received a parcel with a fat, colourful batt, many different sweets and the spindle - which was broken. I HATE our postal service! The spindle was well-wrapped (in bubble wrap AND the whole fibre batt) and it should have survived the journey. I'm really mad right now, as well as sad. (oh dear, that even rhymes...)
I also feel bad for my fellow spinner and her husband who put a lot of work into this beautiful spindle, all for nothing.

Gifts from the Ocean

I just can't help spinning more ocean-themed yarns, I love the colours and the mood they convey. I dyed quite a lot of fibre the other day (hopefully, pictures will follow soon) and there's a lot of blue and aqua there, so I'll be doing some more aquatic yarns. Here's my latest:


I have spun it from hand dyed Bluefaced Leicester/Kid Mohair blend, using the corespinning technique to get this lofty, fluffy, gorgeously textured yarn. The fibre is not simply twisted as in normal yarns, but spun around a core thread. This fibre mix is perfect for the technique, I just love the texture! I added genuine freshwater pearls, sea shells, kyanite beads, and amethyst drops. This is another yarn it will be hard to part with.

I also made an ocean-themed Treasury East which I like a lot - feel free to have a look and comment on it if you like it :-)

The Scarf of HoRRoR

I've already mentioned it and been asked to show it - now I will. And I will tell you the story behind it, too ;-)

Once upon a time, there were two best friends who were both going to be married - not to each other, but to the most wonderful men in the universe ;-) The four of them really fancied learning how to dance so they could stun everyone at their respective wedding, and as luck would have it, they were friends with a dancer/dancing teacher. He was willing to teach them and spent many hours with the two happy couples, correcting their every move and suggesting impressive dance patterns.



Instead of payment, the two women - who were very talented at fibre arts - offered a handmade item of the dancing teacher's choice. Being allergic to wool he requested a silk scarf and he also decided on a cable pattern .

One of the fibre artists dyed some wonderful silk, the other one spun it into more than 800 m of very fine yarn - and here's where the horror began. The yarn should have been of sport weight or fingering weight (14-16 wpi), but silk tends to become thinner than you'd like when spun up, even when you're very skilled. So the young and talented artists ended up with very fine lace yarn of about 30 wpi. Extremely beautiful - and very time-consuming to knit, especially when combined with a cable pattern. The knitting artist has managed 46cm of scarf so far.

It's stunningly beautiful and feels gorgeous, but the extrapolation is 75 hours of knitting time. Now, if there's a person who deserves this scarf it is definitely our dancing teacher - we were all magnificent when performing our respective wedding dance. But that doesn't mean the knitter has to love the project, right? She really wants it to be done.



btw, have I mentioned my husband and I chose House of Fire by Alice Cooper as song for our wedding dance? You'd think our guests might have guessed we weren't going to choose a traditional waltz, but they did sound surprised - it was great fun :-D

New Spindles & New Yarns

Finally our spindles form IST Crafts have arrived! They were so worth the wait. Not only are they very beautiful, but they also work extremely well.

The large one is Santos Rosewood on Sycamore with Sycamore shaft, whorl size 75mm. The small one is Yew on Sycamore with Ash shaft, whorl size 60mm. Weight of the small one is 20g, and I didn't think of weighing the large one before trying it and putting wool on. The wool I used is Bluefaced Leicester, by the way - one of my favourites :-)


I already tried my spindles on Saturday, just after they arrived, and I took the ones Twisted had ordered with me to a friend's birthday, knowing I would see her there. I was smart enough to take some fibre as well, seeing that I hadn't told her the spindels had arrived. So she was surprised and able to test them right away ;-) Fortunately, our friends are used to us spinning or knitting, so there were no problems there. This reminds me of another project I'd like to tell you about, but I'll do that some other time. Look out for the Scarf of Horror! ;-)

And now for some more eye candy - my freshly spun favourites, one corespun and one flower yarn:

Hopefully to be listed quite soon.

Swapped Yarn Bomb

I gave a mushroom yarn bomb to Mademoiselle Chaos at our spinning event at the Unperfekthaus in Essen/Germany, and she has set it free :-) Interested? Lookee here!

I've been rather quiet on the yarn guerilla front, myself, but I really want to go bombing again soon!

One of Many

I'm happy to say that my niddy noddy arrived one day after I blogged about the order. It's somewhat larger, or rather somewhat more bulky than I expected, and quite heavy. I wouldn't want to use it for lace yarns with a lot of yardage, though that might be good training ;-) It's beautiful though, and I like the smell of it. And it's collapsible :-)
I took the photo while the niddynoddy carried one of my latest yarns, soon to be listed!

We're still waiting for our spindles, and haven't heard from Ian yet. I do hope they will arrive soon, I can hardly wait to try them!