rain, rain - go away....

for once the forecast has been right - rain all day, sometimes very heavy! yep, you could say that - if there were a few dry seconds today, I must have missed them. and more to come for tomorrow. together with 12 deg. C it doesn't exactly give a summery feeling - more like end of october and winter at the front door.... the good thing is that I don't have a bad conscience sitting at my spinning wheel! I did a spinning demonstration in Ballyhaunis (the small town close to our village) last sunday, where I (or rather we, all the participants alike) were very lucky. it was quite cool, but the fine drizzle stopped later in the morning and it dried up nicely. not much in the way of sun, but better than nothing. anyway, last year I had to hide in a shop entrance to escape the rain. this year I asked for a small stall and got one. I only demonstrate, I don't sell, so the guys who put up the stalls took the "table" board down and fixed it to the back of the stall. I knew from last year that it can be quite gusty (the stalls are on the parking "lane", along the town's mainroad), so I bought a cheap shower curtain, which I tacked to the stall and weighed it down with the little bags I normally use for my garden tablecloth. not perfect, but better than no wind shelter at all! I strung up some of my handspun skeins for decoration, put my wheel down, a basket with fibres beside me and off I went. I spun for seven hours - and managed to fill two (large) bobbins on my Louet. I've had the idea of spinning "fairy-tale yarns" some time back and finally put together some mixed bags for this. the fairy-tale is not very well known in english speaking countries, I think it's called "Snow-white and Rose-red". there's only one dwarf in it, and a mean one at that. but of course there has to be a bit of drama and a prince, too:) snow-white and rose-red are two nice girls, who live with their mother close to the forest. one winter night they hear a knock at the door. when they open, there's a bear standing outside. he asks for shelter from the cold and they let him in. he comes all winter, but in spring he has to leave. he tells the girls that he has to go and find his treasure, because a dwarf stole it all. the girls meet that dwarf in the woods several time, and even though they help him out of trouble several times, he is very mean and curses at the girls. (no red hat for that fellow!). when the girls meet him for the last time, the bear comes too and kills the dwarf, because not only did he steal the bear's treasure, he also told him that he should eat the girls and not him! of course, the bear isn't really a bear; the dwarf cursed him - he really is a prince! and because every fairy-tale has to have a happy ending, the happy prince marries snow-white - and as luck will have it, he has a brother, who marries rose-red. and of course - they all live happily ever after:)

to make a long story short - I put together 5 bags full of fibres, lots of  white of course and "rose reds", brown and wild for the bear, blue and gold for the prince and lots of earthy colours with grey for the dwarf. I plan to ply them with beads and gold etc... but so far I've only finished three, so pix will come, when I've done all yarns. not sure what I'll use them for - I just liked the idea to follow the characters of a story and make a yarn for each of them.

I also received two new books:

this one is very inspirational - and comes with a dvd to show how to spin those fabulous art yarns. it's not very hard to tempt me into making more yarns, but even a friend of mine, who barely spins these days, got itchy fingers to try some of the yarns out:) thanks, Uli, for giving this to me!

this is a german book about basket weaving. I wanted to try this out for ages, but I esp. like the book, because it shows how to use lots of materials, not only willows. we do have a lot of stuff growing here, such as iris leaves, blackberry vines etc... which can be used for making all kinds of baskets. now I just have to find spare time to try out a few of the new ideas!

this is a felted dog I received from a friend. when I saw the title of a british magazine (mollie makes) I told her that I'd like one of those dogs shown on the cover. I didn't expect to receive one, but here it is - Dobby with a purple hat. our real dog Dobby doesn't like this dog, she seems to think that it is competition for her:) she did try to chew on the felted bone, though...

before the rainy season set in here, I managed to pick a few flowers in the garden. blue geraniums, and white, frilly aquilegias. very pretty, though they tend to shed their petals everywhere at the lightest touch. I do hope that they spread out a bit more - usually they self-seed everywhere (not always in nice colours though, some tend to be rather "wishy-washy"). the rose is the highlight though - it fills the whole kitchen with a heady scent - lovely, even though the variety doesn't have a very pronounced rose shape.  and if we do get hungry, we could even eat the sweet cicely leaves I put in:)             

I hope there are a few flowers left after all that rain, but in the meantime I'll go back to my knitting and spinning. but before that - I have to start baking a bread, because we ran out of that - and who knows, if I can go shopping tomorrow - maybe I should invest in a rubber boat?

june bank holiday

june bank holiday is always the date for the Ballyhaunis summer festival here. I haven't been there for quite some time, but earlier this year I was invited to grab my spinning wheel to demonstrate.... I had my doubts, because I have no stall or marquee to sit under and I didn't want to sell anything (i.e rent a stall), so I had to sit "on the pavement". the weather hasn't been great these last few weeks, but on thursday and friday it was quite hot (ok, for us at least:)). my worry about rain turned to worries about melting in bright sunhine - but only for a short while, because the weather forecast put me right again very soon after! it was going to be cool and showery... well, what's new - for the west of ireland? only, yesterday morning it drizzled.... one of those days they call "soft" (= dripping wet, not with squally showers, but with constant persistent drizzle...). and drizzled.... and drizzled... you get my drift! I wrapped everything into plastic bags and waited for my lift. we came into town quite early, nobody there yet apart from a few early stall holders. lucky for me the shop, where my allocated space was, is closed on sundays. I decided to just take my chances and set up wheel, folding chair and folding table right in the shop entrance - and started spinning. I think every single visitor, who stopped to look at me spinning mentioned that I had chosen a very "cozy" spot! I don't know about other people, but cozy evokes something warm and comfortable for me:)) ok, I admit I should have worn socks, but somehow I didn't think my feet would get quite so cold in summer! I don't get cold easily, but at lunchtime I decided to do something about it, before my feet might fall off or I'd get chillblains! I rushed to the local supermarket and bought - acrylic thermo socks:)) I know, it's a disgrace for a spinner and sock knitter, but then the choice in a supermarket on a sunday was rather limited and I wanted the warmest socks I could find there.... after putting on the socks the rest was a doddle - and of course soon after the weather picked up, the rain stopped, the sun came out - and with it loads of visitors! I think everybody had a good time after all - even though I staid in my shop entrance, because with the sun a cool wind blew down main street.

I didn't see much of the festival, but I met two other spinners and talked to countless people, about wool, about natural dyes, about spinning and wheels - even about Indian charkhas and cotton spinning! I was astonished to see how many people from Pakistan (we have quite a large community of Pakistanis in town - Ballyhaunis even has a mosque!) apparently knew about spinning and wheels, even though the traditional wheels there look quite different to my modern Lendrum. I was also surprised that a lot of older men were very interested in spinning - they all reminisced about seeing it as children, though again the wheels would have looked very different. smaller kids of course are always curious, when they see gadgets they don't know and colourful stuff they can touch...

all in all I spun for about 8 hours - and this is the result:

 I carded some batts on saturday, roughly only, to get a bit of colour on the wheel. I didn't bother to blend very carefully - a few lumps and bumps didn't matter and I was able to spin without looking too closely, when talking to people. I made three batts each, apart from the white and the lower red/blue in the right corner. the former was some white south american top (a lucky find in my stash, nearly a kg of white top on a roll = perfect for some more dyeing sessions:)), which I blended with the leftover fibres from the previous few batts (I don't like to throw away fibres, but I think there could have been a bit more leftover to see more of it in the end result. well, if it's too white as yarn - I can always overdye it!)

I used the plying head with large bobbins, so that I didn't have to change the bobbins all the time. this is a blend of merino, lambswool, some white angora, some green soy silk - the red was madder dyed, the rest... I think the greens were both dyed with reed flowers, but I am not entirely sure about that. too many small dyed balls in green and yellow! without labels of course.

 this is my "witch mix" (the flash brightens the colour, the original is much darker; see above) - some naturally black alpaca top, some black merino, some purple corriedale, pink merino and some glitzy angelina - oh yes, and some wicked green, but only very little. it looks dark and sinister but seeing the glitter in it made a lot of little girls go ooh and aahh:))

I think I will add some green beads to the yarn later, to make the yarn look even more witchy and evil:)) I had planned to fix them by spinning them in, but I decided fiddling about with small beads stringed onto some longer fibres (alpaca?) might not be the best idea for spinning demonstrations....

I also took a basket full of handspun samples with me to show. which proved that everybody always goes for the coloured designer yarns first - you can see if the visitor is a spinner as they are the only ones to grab soft and squishy special fibres from the mix, even (or perhaps because?) when the yarn is fine and evenly spun and undyed. on seeing this photo I realized I have to do some more bright reds very soon, and maybe something in yellow, too!

weirdly enough we had another festival exactly on the same dates as the one above. this is in the neighbouring village of Aghamore - a music festival, designed to challenge  other big do's like Oxegen etc. we had our doubts whether or not this will work out (the village is really small and where would 5000 visitors come from?) - and so far we haven't really heard much about it. I admit that I don't know any of the names, but that doesn't mean much; I wouldn't exactly call myself a connaisseur in that area. we were just glad that the noise level was bearable - but I wonder if it was a success or not. I suppose paying 60 euros for one day would be rather costly, esp. if you don't want to go all by yourself? they had quite a list of vendors on their homepage, but you couldn't reach any of them if you didn't pay the ticket price to get behind the fenced off areas:(( so no buffalo burgers for us!

the last picture shows my reward yesterday evening after 8 hours of spinning:)) ok, it was a leftover from saturday's birthday cake (DH), but it was nice to drink a hot cuppa (and wear proper woolly socks again, though I have to admit that the thermos were quite cozy on my feet, despite being acrylic) and eat something nice with it.

oh yes, and if any of the organizers of the summer festival read this entry - well done - and thanks for the nice surprise at the end of the day:)) and, of course, thanks for the lifts by two volunteers....