My First Handspun

After a bit of trial and error, here is a picture of the first results of my spinning attempts.*

I'm quite pleased with it, overall. It's a bit lumpy-bumpy, but I was definitely getting better at making a yarn of consistent thickness by the end (although the single strand on view here wouldn't suggest so). I'm definitely going to carry on spinning the rest of the fibre I have and see if I can't get something a bit more even by the time I finish it all. If I can, then I'll consider the spinning experiment a success, and I'll probably get in some more fibre supplies. I also want to knit this yarn and see how it comes out - I imagine it'll be pretty bad, but we shall have to see. The current plan to to knit a scarf with all the handspun I produce until I am capable of actually coming up with anything decent. Unless I make some unexpected Great Leaps Forward, I imagine it will look like an 'organic' version of that amazingly long and brightly-coloured scarf that Dr Who used to wear.

A few observations about hand spinning have struck me so far:

- Spinning seems to be one of those things which arevery, very easy to start and do badly, but which take a lifetime to perfect. The simple action of tying some fibre to a spindle and letting it drop practically does itself, but feeding the yarn through in such a way as to produce a consistent thickness is bloody tricky business. Apparently learning English is much the same, albeit without the scraps of fibre that end up covering the carpet.

- Things in spinning happen surprisingly fast, much faster than knitting which tends to take forever even for the fastest knitters. This means that, unless one is careful, a whole wodge of yarn can end up being unintentionally spun and ends up being a thick, lumpy Right Mess.**

- I realised very quickly why spinning wheels are so great, since essentially they allow the spinner two hands to feed the yarn through rather than one. Many disasters occur with a spindle when the spinner is temporarily distracted from the fibre by the need to get the spindle spinning again.

- It's clearly far more trouble than it's worth, but tremendous fun all the same.

*OK, technically not the very first attempt. There was no way I was going to put up a picture of the very first attempt.

** This would be why I'm not putting up a picture of the very first attempt.

Cardigan Complete, and a Daffodil Festival

Here's a picture of a mystery parcel that was lying on our Living Room floor for a few days last week.

Can you tell what it is yet?

It's a cardigan!

Congratulations to K for getting this finished, blocked and ready to wear. She beat me hands down when it came to finishing, since not only was the cardigan ready a week before my waistcoat, but she had to make sleeves as well. In case you're interested, the pattern comes from Sirdar's Simple and Easy Knits , which is remarkable for the unfussiness of its designs. K, like me, is rarely impressed with the majority of clothes for 20-somethings available in the shops; unlike me, she prefers things that are classic, simple and elegant to things that look like they have only just come off the sheep.

She was able to wear her creation proudly all weekend, which turned out to be a good couple of days for all things sustainable and craft-related. On Saturday our local Scout Troop ran their annual spring jumble sale over the road, which as ever turned out to be full of bargins. I think the final haul was one Monsoon skirt (possibly for Mother), one cosy Monsoon zip-up cardigan for K, one Hawkshead polo-neck for me, one green Kew cardigan to share, and a long, cosy, natural wool, cabled cardigan for me. The latter is so, precisely, exactly, perfectly me, that my immediate reaction on seeing it was 'great! That will save me making one just like it'. I also got a nice length of tweedy brown fabric, which would make a very nice winter skirt if I get round to spending some quality time with the sewing machine.

On Sunday we went with neighbour Zoe to Thriplow Daffodil Festival. It was pretty good (albeit not cheap), if you like that sort of thing. There were sheepdog trials, which I definitely do like (I still mourn the loss of One Man and His Dog on BBC, even though I was a trendy 16 when it came off air). There was also some fine Morris Dancing from the good men of The Devil's Dyke Morris Men , who usually crop up at this kind of event in the Cambridge area. I have a soft spot for Morris Dancing, even if it is one of the two things in life one is never supposed to try (and the other being incest, that is hardly a recommendation), although thanks to having spent my teenage years spent reading Terry Pratchett, I still have a tendency to regard it as a slightly sinister activity. Apart from Morris Dancers, they also had the obligatory tents of 'local' craft stalls (including the equally obligatory 'African Crafts' stall - K has a small collection of photographs of 'African Crafts' stalls at unlikely locations worldwide. The current winner is from the Christmas market at the Norwegian Folk Museum in Oslo). There were quite a few daffodils, not to mention bouncing lambs in fields, just as it should be at this time of year, and these made me very happy, since at this time of year I greatly miss the fields full of lambs that marked the springs of my childhood. I also bought a woad plant from a herb stall, so perhaps I'll be dying my own cloth Boudicca-Blue later this year (it'll be a loom next).

Perhaps best of all, there was a working smithy, and I would recommend the Thriplow Daffodil Festival just to go and have a peek at this. The smithy itself is the original village smithy, which has presumably stood on the village green in one form or another since the year dot. It ceased to operate regularly in the early 20th century, but has been kept going as a heritage concern and centre for village history, and there are clearly people around who still know how to use it. Indeed, there even seemed to be a Young Apprentice. The smith-in-residence was selling lucky horseshoes for a quid, so needless to say I bought one.

Does anyone else have Views on which way up a horseshoe should be? I was always taught that it had to be 'upwards-pointing', otherwise the luck would drain out, but perhaps that is just a Yorkshire thing.

Spin like a Viking

I got a new toy in the post this morning and I am very excited about it.

Yup, it's a spindle, complete with four blobs (rovings? tops? I'm not quite on board with all the jargon yet) of natural wool and an instruction leaflet. A start-to-spin kit, if you will, thanks to the nice people at www.forestfibres.co.uk .

The spindle is a pure indulgence on my part. Yes, I would love, love to be able to spin my own wool. Of course I would. There is a passage in my lovely Stitch 'n' Bitch book describing one of their designers, who taught herself to knit from a book, then learnt to spin and 'is now trying to work out how she can smuggle sheep into her Manhattan Apartment'. I don't have a single friend who hasn't read that and not immediately gone, 'hah. Sounds like you'. I would love to spin, but I really don't have the time to learn. Even at the moment, when I'm reliably knitting every night, I usually don't get a chance to start until 9pm, or even later. This is why my long knitted eco-wool waistcoat is only now approaching completion around a year since I started it, and why I still haven't made my dream skirt, even though I've had the material and the pattern for over six months.

I know all this, but I still couldn't resist the spindle. It actually never occured to me to get a spindle, even though as a good medieval historian I am very well aware that it is perfectly possible to spin on one, since spinning wheels were only invented around 1500 or so. It took another knitting medievalist to point this out to me, when I was sitting have coffee with a her and talking about spinning, knitting, crochet and many other forms of craft, just like 20-something students do, right? She was being extremely nice to me after I had heard that I didn't get a job I had really wanted, and was happy to listen to me ramble on about how much I would like a spinning wheel, except that our flat is already bursting at the seams (the spindle is going to be a bit of a squeeze). 'Why not spin with a spindle?', was the helpful suggestion. Immediately, visions of strapping medieval housewives wielding spindles and distaffs while happily waving goodbye to their viking husbands sprung fully formed into my mind. If generations of medieval women could do it, why not me? (I suspect I am about to find out, since rumour has it that spinning is not as easy as this 14th century lady makes it look. At the very least, I think it will be a while before I can spin and feed chickens at the same time.)

I'll let you know how I get on. Once I've cracked this, the next step is the sheep.

The Latte Knitter

Please don't hate me, but I spent most of last week 'working' in various cafes around Cambridge and drinking innumerable lattes. My rather paltry justification for indulging in this particular humanities PhD student perk was that I haven't had a great deal of holiday this year (spending a week in a wood in Dorset with 80 plus Boy Scouts does not count) and so I came back from out brief and wet sojourn in the Lake District with an appetite for more. Spending time working in cafes in one way to try and capture something of a holiday mood while still actually doing work. As part of this 'holiday', I spent Friday learning to read and knit at the same time (if you saw a blonde girl knitting in Caffe Nero on King's Parade in Cambridge, that was me), I might add with some success. Apart from the rather impressive length of Herdwick-wool scarf produced in the process (and 100 pages of medieval history tome digested), I was utterly delighted when a random middle-aged man actually came up to me simply to say how lovely it was to see someone knitting, exactly as my new and shiny 'Stitch 'n' Bitch' book assured me people would do if one knitted in cafes.

The only problem was that I rather foolishly forgot to bring a pen with me, even though I knew that I was doing a pattern that required a certain amount of row counting and that my ability to keep track of rows in my head is really not that good. In case you should find yourself in a similar position, let me assure you that it is perfectly possible to improvise an effective stitch counter through the careful arrangement of crumbs from a recently consumed almond croissant.

Herdwick sheep and scratchy wool

We have just got back a four-day escape to the Lake District. The idea was to celebrate mine and K's birthdays (which, believe it or not, were on Friday and Saturday respectively) at the top of some large mountain or other, but as I'm sure you all will have worked out by now, it rained. And then it rained some more. Finally, there was some rain, and all thoughts of climbing even fairly small mountains were shelved in favour of rather more modest rambles.

Being the intrepid lasses we are, we did manage a few smaller walks despite the endless downpours. I reckoned that it was an important step on K's path to genuine Britishness that she was heard to utter the words 'I think it might be getting brighter' on beholding a patch of sky that was a slightly lighter shade of grey and that she donned waterproofs and set out on a two hour walk even though it was already raining and showed absolutely no signs of letting up. Who needs a citizenship test? While we we on these slightly soggy walks, we met quite a lot of sheep.

These sheep are Herdwicks, the traditional breed of the Cumberland and Westmorland fells. Uk readers may remember that they were hit particularly hard by the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001, not only because Cumbria was badly affected but because each flock is 'heafed' to a particular patch of mountainside, meaning that the farmers can allow them to graze freely after they have lambed in the Spring without having to worrying that they will end up somewhere they shouldn't be. Personally, I am incredibly glad that Herdwicks are still prevalent in Cumbria. Those who complain about British farmers (and I'm not saying that such complaints are always unreasonable) should still remember that they do a lot of invisible work in keeping the landscape looking the way it does - I for one do not especially want a Lake District covered in birch scrub. In any case, they are an attractive breed and very much part of traditional Cumbrian heritage. And I'm told they taste nice.

There is only one problem; they are completely uneconomical to keep. They are bred mostly for their meat, but since they only have one lamb, it is hard for them to compete with other upland breeds like Swaledales which reliably have two lambs even in fairly harsh conditions. Their wool, although extremely hardy and warm, is practically unused, to the extent a few years ago, the British Wool association offered to pay farmers a penny a kilo for their wool 'as a goodwill gesture'. People want mohair and cashmere, apparently, and the only reason that Herdwicks ultimate survive as a commercial breed is because of government grants and because many of the farms are owned by the National Trust and are obliged, thanks to Beatrix Potter (a well-known Cumbrian sheep-farmer), to keep Herdwicks on their land.

But what about people who like scratchy, smelly wool? I admit that this is not to everyone's taste, but as readers of earlier posts might have noticed, I actually like the kind of wool that still looks and smells like it once belonged to a sheep, and there's nothing like a slightly scratchy and hard-wearing jumper for a day in the garden, a Sunday afternoon welly walk or just an afternoon curled up in front of the fire with a cup of tea. I was therefore extremely pleased to discover another new range of 'plain' wools on a rainy Saturday morning in Keswick. To my mind, these are even better than Sirdar's eco-wool, because they are produced from exactly those British breeds that struggle to find a market for their wool - including Herdwicks!

So for anyone else out there who doesn't mind a few tickles in their jumpers, allow me to recommend these to you. Not only these yarns plain, simple and hard-wearing, but they help Cumbrian farmers keep their beautiful landscape exactly as it is known and loved.

Now all I need to do is to find a decently plain knitting pattern to match...

More to life than stereotypes

I went to the University ‘kaffeklatsch’ (for want of a better word) for lesbian, bisexual and transgender women last week. I don’t go that often these days, but I was vaguely involved in setting it up many years ago and still have some good friends in the group, so I like to make an appearance every now and then. Five minutes after I arrived, a girl I hadn’t met before asked if anyone would mind if she got her knitting out. Of course we wouldn’t we said, we all like knitting. She was going great guns at making a fine pair of green 'gothic spire' socks , I was most impressed. I mentioned my current knitting projects. Another girl started to describe a blanket she was crocheting. We swapped tips on wool suppliers and local knitting groups, and suggested we turn the coffee meeting into an informal knitting circle.

University LesBiGay societies periodically have a bit of bother with student evangelical Christian groups. At Exeter University, one rather extreme Christian group was removed from the register of student societies after a prolonged campaign for promoting homophobia and campaigning against transgender students. I can’t help feeling that if they actually went along to some of these events they would be terribly disappointed

Eco-Wool

This weekend was definitely a weekend of contrasts. K and I celebrated my newly acquired driver’s licence (!) by driving all the way to North Yorkshire and back on Saturday so that we could take my Grandmother out for lunch on her birthday, while Sunday was spent lounging around the flat recovering. A rare lazy Sunday give me a chance to blitz my current main knitting project, a long knitted waistcoat that I have been crawling along with for the last couple of months. After many weeks of searching I found exactly the pattern I was looking for so I'm keen to get it finished by Autumn, but it's my first adult knitted garment and I don't know how long it will take. This is all I have so far...

I tend to get a bit frustrated with available knitting patterns, for pretty much the same reasons I get irritated with dressmaking patterns. My Grandmother, bless her, is no longer able to knit because of arthritis, so passed on a heap of her patterns on Saturday. Unfortunately I have to say that most of them were utterly hideous, just like most of the knitting patterns that I encounter in our local shops. Frills, ruffles and multi-coloured everything yet again seems to be the order of the day, and it can seem practically impossible to get a decent yarn that is both 100% wool and a natural colour. Obviously there is a good market for the kind of patterns favoured by Grandmothers, but in light of the increasing popularity of knitting amongst younger women, I can’t help but think there also is room for some good plain down-to-earth styles, since lots of the younger women who knit are looking for a bit more simplicity in their clothing, whereas the patterns provide quite the opposite. Have you any idea how hard it is to find a simple wool jumper in the kind of shops usually frequented by 24 year-olds? I for one like to knit and sew because I want the option of making clothes in the styles and colours that I can’t always find in the shops. This does not generally include mohair cardigans in a delightful pink and lime green blend.

Back to the waistcoat, you can imagine my delight when I discovered Sirdar's new ‘Eco-wool’, complete with really nice book of patterns that even included that waistcoat I had been searching for. Seriously, they could have used me as a focus group - the colours are perfect (‘sludgey green and sludgy brown’, according to my mother), the yarn is that rare thing, 100% DK wool, and is made without any artificial dyes or chemicals. It's lovely to knit, and I would certainly recommend it to any other knitters out there looking for something both natural and straightforward. Best of all, the wool smells of rich, heady lanolin, reminding me of the clumps of the sheep’s wool caught on fences and picked up on walks as a child . Or indeed on walks as an adult, as I'm pleased to say that I haven't yet stopped filling my pockets with interesting bits of wool, feathers and pebbles every time I step outside in my wellies.

I've already made a hat from the same pattern book. It's kind of organic-goddess-meets-Bob-Marley in style. The kitten’s name is Douglas. This year my parents can officially claim to be self-sufficient in black kittens.

Before too long I should have a waistcoat to match my profile picture.