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Mega Wool Order

Mega Wool Order

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In November I decided I needed to order some more wool. No big surprise there! The bigger the order the more you save on shipping. I decided I would offer to order some wool for other members of my weavers and spinners guild. I was thinking maybe 20-25 pounds and I would make up the rest to get us to the 44 pound shipping rate. Well did I ever underestimate the response. I ended up with 168 pounds of wool to order.

The boxes came before Christmas no problem. then 2 came after Christmas. Customs decided to have a look in these. This is what one of the boxes looked like:

wool box

All the wool inside was fine. then it was on to sorting all the wool. the min order was 1 pound so first I sorted all the one pound bags. I borrowed my hubbies bread cooling racks to organise everything.

me sorting 3

Then I had to separate orders. It’s a good thing we have a good scale.

1488125_10153696850215527_1198658836_nme weighing wool

It took the better part of a day to get it all sorted, Ross helped with sorting and then went off and made dinner while I finished.  The next day my son and I checked  and boxed all the orders so I could take them to the guild and deliver them.  The nice thing about doing this was I got to see so many different wools. I got to feel yak and angora, fake and real cashmere and see many of the wonderful colours and the multicoloured  wools the World of Wool has to offer. World of Wool was very nice and shipping was fast especially when I made the order so close to Christmas.

4 2

I must say that I couldn’t have done this so easily if it hadn’t been for the assistance of Jean. I can set up an excel file and make it sort things alphabetically but that’s it. She was a wiz  with the spread sheet. She made it add things up at this way and that and separate out things and make my life a whole lot easier. I already have people asking If I will do it a gain later in the year. I think Jean and I should ask for a commission next time. :O)

 

 

Getting Organised.

Getting Organised.

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Like just about everyone getting organised is one of my goals for the new year. As you can see nothing stacks and it’s a mess. I can’t get to the selves to get anything or put anything away.

the problem

To that end I bought some storage bins. I got 2 large ones with the attached lids the open down the middle. These are for white and black merino. I always have larger quantities of them. I got some small ones for yarn and shoe box size for smaller quantities.

bins

I took my yarn out of the cardboard box and bags in a bin and now they are sorted and easy to see.

yarn sorted

Some Yarn to ply and to dye.

to ply and to dye

I also did my thread. Here it all is on the new shelves I got for Christmas. It’s a start but there is much more to do.

shelved

The other things that’s happened over the Christmas holidays.

triplets These 3 are on bottles, 2 moms but one had no  milk and one that wasn’t in the least bit interested. They are in a bigger pen in my basement. they get bottles 4 times a day.

These two were born last Friday morning when it was -39.

pink lamb gray lamb

They are both boys even though one is in a pink coat. Their mommy loves them very much. They had a heat lamp for the first couple of days.  The weather has warmed up so they don’t have coats anymore. There have been a few more (10 at last count) that are still with their mothers. Hopefully not to many more in this cold. The ram was breeding some later in the fall so fingers crossed. The young fellow we thought was a wether ( neutered) and is infact a ram has been penned up separately for possible use next year.

Wool Supplies and Samples

Wool Supplies and Samples

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While I was laying out my white texture felt piece the other week, I had all my bags of white and light grey wools spread out on my floor, along with my stash of raw wool locks, so I thought I may aswell go ahead and do an inventory of my white wools, to see if I’m running low on any and need to order more. I usually keep a small stash of each wool breed (or colour) out in my felting boxes and put the rest away in my supplies bags and boxes, it makes it easier to have a large selection of breeds or colours to choose from without taking up as much room. These are the white wool tops, scoured and carded wools I most commonly use.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAMy favourite raw wool locks are Gotland, Teeswater and Wensleydale. There’s also some raw mohair locks here.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAfter scribbling down the names of all the different wools I commonly use, I checked whether there was a good amount in my felting box and whether I was low in my supplies and needed to order more. This took a while, and it suddenly occured to me that if I made myself a document on Word, I could print it out any time I needed to do another stock check. It’s only taken me about 4 years of felting to think of that 🙂

WHITE WOOLS INVENTORY

A few years ago, I spotted some really inexpensive index card holders in our local supermarket. I thought they would be perfect to use for wool samples, so I bought a few and made myself a cover for one.

4635492385_23f0e04d9f_oI like to pull off a small sample of wool tops and staple it to the index card with the name of the shade or blend. I buy almost all of my supplies from World of Wool, but on the rare occasion I buy something elsewhere, I make a note of that too.

coloursIt’s really handy for natural wools too, the texture and staple length can be seen as well as the colour.

naturalsDo you have a system for storing your wools and fibres or keeping track if supplies are getting low? How about storage? I know that is always a favourite topic for fibre artists! 🙂

January Projects

January Projects

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I’ve been trying to find ways of having a few projects on the go so I can work on them for a few minutes at a time where possible. A few months ago, I posted about a couple of felt pieces I’d made with the intention of practising stitches for the Take A Stitch Tuesday challenge. I didn’t keep up with the challenge, so had the pieces spare. I decided to add some stitching to the first piece. This is how it looked originally. I started by machine stitching around the patches of colour.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is a close up:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOver the next couple of days, I added some hand stitched straight stitches, first in in yellow and then added some in orange.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnother project I got started on this week is a white texture felt piece. Liz from That Fuzzy Feeling blog, recently made a gorgeous piece of texture felt and it inspired me to make one. I decided to make a natural white one, so I got to play with (and smell!) my collection of wool, alpaca and mohair locks. They are mostly unwashed so my hands felt really nice afterwards.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe first day I managed to get as far as laying it out and sewing up around the edges.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAHere are some of the gorgeous locks I positioned around the edges:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASo far, I’ve managed to add the stitches from the top to the bottom.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThanks to Ruth for encouraging us to find ways to fit in a few minutes of fibre time each day, I’ve managed to get a lot more done this week than I otherwise would have. It might not be much each day, but before long, it all adds up to finished projects I wouldn’t have had without the challenge 🙂

Sewing, Felt Hat to Purse, Felt Boots.

Sewing, Felt Hat to Purse, Felt Boots.

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Last time I told you about organising one section of my room and clearing off the table. My next area is the sewing area. It’s coming along. It started like this:

sewing area before

There is also a bunch of stuff on the floor under and around it that you can’t see in the picture. I have made progress but the shelves to the bookcase have disappeared so it’s hard to fill them up. I did switch the old singer that needs a part for a newer one. I haven’t tried it but it may need a cleaning. I still have the pfaff I can use. I want to set it up for free motion embroidery. It is a work in progress

As part of trying to do some fiber art everyday I have been working on converting a hat to a purse, well, 3 hats actually. The hats started out looking like this:

hat to purse 2

I cut the holy part off and did this:

hat to purse 1

This should add some interest with great texture.

Here is one that has the texture done. The colour on the left one is more what it looks like I think it’s called Laurel.

hat to purse 3 hat to purse 4

I had planed to get the lining in before posting but that didn’t happen. I will show you when I get it done. It will also get a zipper too. I haven’t decided if it should be a clutch or I should find some sort of strap for it. What do you think?

Lastly I have started my on-line boot class. It took me  a while to convince You Tube to let me see the videos and then my Internet went out for a week. So all I managed to do was my sample and get my pattern drawn out.  The sample of gray Finn wool shrank a little more than 50%.

shrinkage

There was a lot of measuring and some math to get the pattern the correct size for the shrinkage.  This is what it looks like at the moment.

boot patten

My mom came for a visit so I couldn’t lay out the boots today. I decided I want to make a leave motif on the boots when they are done so I cut out leaf shapes in white and black. the booths are gray. I stretched a couple with some vintage “artisanal silk”. I am told it’s not real silk but its pretty.  I don’t know if I like it. I was thinking of sewing some veins on with my machine to see how that looks. I have some dissolvable interfacing I thought if I put the leaves on that I should be able to stitch them.

leaves

So I haven’t been able to actually do some fiber art every day but I have been thinking about it everyday and getting to play most days.