Lyn – rosiepink

I’m still using my holly bowl as a fruit bowl on my sideboard, but with spring colours appearing in the garden and the days getting brighter it looks a bit out of place.

So I set to and made a new bowl for the spring.  I laid out a three layer circle of sky-blue merino wool fibres, 50cm diameter (20”), then a fourth colourful layer topped with a few random sprinkles of silk fibres.  The silk fibres dried darker than I thought they would but never mind, on with the stitching!

After a lot of stitching (and a bit of unpicking and swear-jar filling) here it is.

Annie has made a second Winter Trees Table Centre. It was a friend’s 80th birthday and she had said how much she liked the original, so it was a nice idea to make one for her as a present, and she was thrilled with it! As an added bonus Annie has photographed the process to make a new tutorial which will be available as soon as she can glue her bum to the chair for long enough to finish it!

She also decided a spring project would be nice to do and had enjoyed making the autumn beads last year, so decided to try some beads in spring colours. This is a work in progress and most likely will be made into a decorative home item, perhaps in a vase again, not sure yet!

Lastly, you may remember this ball of fluff and fibres and odds n ends…. where Annie pulled apart a picture that was not working and had screwed it up into a ball for later consideration.

On the spur of the moment last week she decided to grab it as it was and try to spin from the blob of bits! She says she probably should have made a batt but nonetheless some interesting yarn happened, and it will be great in wet felting or possibly in weaving. Probably not so much good for knitting! It is deliberately under spun, over spun, and messy. She finds the spinning wheel she has very frustrating since it is a traditional old Ashford and is probably designed for making fine even yarns – it only has a small orifice so not very conducive to chunky bits! and also has lots of hooks on the flyer that catch on all the sticky out bits and it gets in a tangle. A more suitable spinning wheel is definitely on the very long “Want” list! She wraps it on mount board, rather than making a skein or a ball so that she can pick out colours that she likes and cut a short length for felting, it is quite a challenge since it springs about (this one is not plied and has a lot of tension!) but is tamed with cuts on the side of the card that the ends of the yarn can be secured in to.

Do the spring colours that are popping up inspire you to make something new?