I'm a winner!

I'm not a big competition enterer (is there such a word? Probably not!) - but when I saw one on Planet Penny's wonderful blog to win a Daylight Lamp  I couldn't resist entering. Penny asked how a Daylight Lamp would make life easier for me - now that wasn't a hard one to answer! Up here, in the northernmost town in mainland UK , the winter nights are long and the days are short. Here's a pic from my kitchen window last winter:

You can see my lovely little studio on the left there. However it does get a tad dark and gloomy during the long winter months, so I really coveted the lamp.

So I entered the competition, then off I went on holiday for two weeks and thought no more about it, because I never win anything. (that could be because I rarely enter anything, but let's not split hairs now...)

So imagine my amazement when I got home to find that I had WON!!! I had a lovely email from Penny and my Swan table lamp was very speedily dispatched and arrived all the way up in the far north in very quick time. I finally got it set up and working and took some pictures this afternoon, I am so thrilled with it!

Here is the lamp in all its glory - not the best pic but I haven't found a home for it yet, so it is just lurking on top of my 1942 Singer sewing machine at present:

It has a fabulous acrylic magnifier which pops on and off the base really easily, and can be positioned wherever you want it. The light is neat and also will move wherever you need it.

And look at the difference in the photos! Without the lamp ...

And with the lamp ...

Whoo hoo!!

(The picture, by the way, is of my binsenkorbchen socks that I am knitting up ... wonderful pattern creating by slipping stitches rather than stranding - really pleased with them so far!)

So a huge thank you to Planet Penny for running the competition, and to the random number generator for picking me as the winner, and to  Daylight Company for their brilliant lamp!

More Adventures - this time in yarn dyeing

Wow, what a long time since I last posted! Apologies, life has been a little hectic around here. Crafting still going on (at a slightly reduced rate!) but back to normal after next week.

In the meantime, I finally got round to dyeing my lovely hanks of yarn I got from World of Wool . I got a gift voucher from there for my fortieth birthday last year, and promptly invested in  two hanks of yarn and six wee pots of dye. However I was then too scared to use them! So this week I got together with a friend and she showed me what to do.

Firstly, we dunked the yarn (and some carded fibre to experiment with first) into a bucket filled with malt vinegar. I didn't realise you could use normal brown vinegar, I thought it had to be distilled! So that was my first surprise.

This is Bettine giving my wool and her fibre a good pummelling in the bucket. You can imagine the smell for yourself! It's not really a very social activity!

She showed me some of the yarn she had dyed herself the previous week - aren't the colours wonderful?

Unfortunately I forgot to turn the flash off so some of the colours are reflected in the lustre of the yarn but you can see what wonderful vibrant colours she got! There's a mix of painted and pan-dyed yarns there.

OK - on to our experiments. This one didn't go as expected (actually to be fair, none of them did! But that's half the fun of it!). I used cherry red, crimson and orange, but it all ended up fairly much one colour.

You can see some undyed fleece in the background there. This is the fleece all dyed and ready to go into the microwave (I put it inside a microwaveable bag first to make sure we didn't coat the inside with dye!).

The next thing we did was take the first skein of yarn and pot-dye it in two colours, fuschia and periwinkle. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the dyeing process because my hands were covered at that point! But here is the end result, with the red fleece and another piece of fleece dyed in fuschia and periwinkle, all drying on my washing line (scuse the poor photo, the light was just beginning to fade at this point)

And here's the skein all dried and ready to wind!

A lot more pink than I intended, but I was really pleased with the variation in the colour in the blue.

Naturally I wound it up and started knitting a pair of socks straightaway!

That was yesterday. Today, embolded by my success, I decided to paint my other skein (I had kept it in a bag so it was still damp with vinegar). So I laid out my yarn on bin bags and clingfilm, and started with some turquoise just dripped onto two points of the yarn:

I then took some bright yellow and dribbled that over the yarn. Then I added a wee bit of turquoise to make a lovely green, and splatted that in the spaces. I'm about half way through doing that here.

Now what I didn't anticipate was how much the colours would mix together during the setting process! Here's the yarn just after it came out of the microwave (I did it for three minutes in a 700w microwave, then did it for another minute just to make sure).

I think maybe I hadn't done it for long enough, but I was scared of burning the yarn. I took it out and rinsed it ... and all the colours began to blend! Never mind, I'm very happy with the finished result.

The turquoise is now more of an emerald green - I was aiming to have "dots" of colour when it is knitted up but I think they will in fact be wee lines of bright green - we shall see!

One thing I will say though ... I am hooked!! I can't wait to try this again!!

I love commissions!

Although I am still making my sock monkeys, the majority of my work this year so far has been via commissions (and most of them knitting ones!). I have a couple on the go at the moment and a couple in the pipeline. I love working on commissions, the back-and-forth with my customer to choose what they would like, the visualising of the project, the research to get the final look just right. But most of all I love the way that it brings variety to my work and often introduces me to new techniques and materials that I've not had the chance to try out before.

This is one of my current commissions, a pair of Gryffindor Pride socks:

Gryffindor Pride designed by Ann Kingstone

New techniques learned here - knitting cuffs with knitting in elastic (very odd stuff!), and my first attempt at intarsia in the round. It's not that hard actually, just looks impressive! Quite slow to knit though; this is about 10 days' progress. I'm hoping I pick up speed.

My other commission on the go today is some bunting for a fabulous friend Bronwen in the States who makes nappy cakes for baby showers. She sent me some divine flannel material, which I have augmented with a lovely yellow design I found which I feel complements her work fabulously!

Just look at that cute fabric with the babygrows!

So I sat in my kitchen this afternoon, with my i-pod tuned to Radio 3, and cut out some bunting:

As you can see, not ironed yet!

You can probably just make out in the picture my scribblings for the design. You can almost guarantee I will lose that bit of paper before I finish. On the right are my treasured pinking shears, which once belonged to my granny (and I think to her mother too). I lost them for about 14 months and truly mourned them as I thought they had gone for good. They are wonderful scissors. Any seamstress will know how valuable good scissors are (and how attached you get to them!).

More past projects tomorrow :o)

Sunshiney loveliness

Today started off so well. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, so after making leek and potato soup for lunch we headed off for a walk on the beach, where we had great fun splashing around and skimming stones in the surf. Then the clouds started heading our way so we made our way home, and the rain started. It is now pouring down with no sign of any let-up! Ah well, at least we got out (and back) before the weather changed.

Anyway, to remind us of the nice weather earlier on, here are a couple of pics of some things I made earlier in the week (and photographed when the sun was out!):
A beach bag in lovely sunny colours (this is going in the post as a gift next week);



... and a pair of VERY bright and cheerful socks - they will definitely help to see me through the dark winter months to come!