Spinning lesson on South West Train

Well what an adventure, I went with my son & his partner down to Hampshire to visit Maggie Oliver [secretary of British Coloured Sheep Breeders Association] While I gathered information on fleece, breeds and small mills we took time out to visit Carol Keats at Willow Close Studio. http://www.easistes.co.uk/webbsgreenfarmwool

What a lovely clever lady. Carol was very generous with her advise, skills and inspiration. Our time in her studio flew by and was not nearly long enough. Her passion for fibres & colour is infectious and at each turn was happy to demonstrate her teaching skills.

my son brought a 2nd hand spinning wheel that Carol had in her studio, nobody gave any thought to the fact that we had to get home on the TRAIN! We bundled into Maggie's car, with wheel and I might add several other purchases and headed for the station and the London Train. Not to waste any time, an hour & 40Min's into London. We started a spinning lesson as we journeyed home. The train guard had not seen a spinning wheel before let a lone have spinning lessons on a train.

I have heard of extreme ironing, has anyone else taken part in extreme spinning. I would be interested of anyone else's unusual spinning locations.

Handspun & naturally dyed

Yet another pile of sample dyeing, this was BFL uncarded and the fleece was cleaned, then dyed. The lovely corkscrew curls in the fleece gave me a lovely texture and as the fleece took the dye in different intensities the range of hues is great.

I have not knitted these up into test squares but I think it will knit to approximately aran weight.

I have a pile of welsh mountain so with luck I might get time for more experiments this week end.

Handspun Yarn

Well after dyeing my Suffolk fleece with natural vegetable dyes, using a herbal mordant. I decided to spin without carding the fleece to give texture to the yarn, I also found that the dyed fleece had interesting areas of different hues of colour and I thought that the yarn would be slightly variegated, instead of a flat colour. I hope the sample photo's reflect the effect I was trying to achieve.

Highland Guild of spinners weavers & dyers

Well what a busy weekend, after a great morning experimenting with freeform knitting & crochet and learning to throw the rule book out the window and play with yarns and shapes. I then had to get my head round planning our Guilds exhibition for 2009, never done this before so I feel like a fish out of water. Like the freeform workshop I would like to throw a rule book out the window, that is if I could find one!!!
Has anyone out there got any advise for a novice Exhibition co-ordinator.