Berlin orange wool and dyed wool

I had some of the springy Berlin orange and yellow and pink wool left over, but not enough for a whole scarf, and nothing that really matched it. So I pulled out some of the skeins that I had made eighteen months ago and never got round to dyeing, and the food colouring, and dyed a couple of yellow/orange/pink skeins in the hope that it would get close to matching.

It kind of matched. Some were a bit closer than others. I used my awesome ball winding thingo again, which made a very professional looking ball. It is reasonably time consuming but very contemplative. 

And it made a very pretty scarf in the end. More orange than anything else, but a bit of yellow and pink. The close up is a bit more bluey than the real scarf, which is more like the full-length one. Another one to be folded up and put on the pile! Far too hot to think of anything woollen at the moment. 

Merry Christmas everyone

We had a very pleasant Christmas with a long lunch at friends, with other friends, and an assortment of teenage / young adult children. It was 33 degrees, but we managed to stay hydrated in traditional Christmas fashion. The food was amazing as ever - our host is a fantastic cook - and a mix up of traditional plum pudding and roasts with oysters, prawns, scallops and a wonderful lemon slice. Mmmmm, food....

We did put the Christmas tree up in the end, or rather number one son did. He decided to only put the gold and red ornaments on this year so it is a more subdued effect than usual. It is elegant until we turn on the garish multicoloured lights. I am more of a "throw everything you can at the Christmas tree" kind of person but I also left it in the box for ten days, so mustn't grumble. I have not bothered cropping out the piles of washing, or the fabulous fireplace. Not that we are likely to use it, it's heading for 36 today then going to get properly hot for the rest of the week! Canberra is very quiet, and very baking.

Alpaca number three

The blue/grey alpaca went on the warp so beautifully that I thought I would do one that was just alpaca - with a more spacious sett and wider, for a shawl. And it worked! I'm so pleased with it.

Not pleased with the photography though. I tried to use the wardrobe door handles again to give an idea of the width and drape, but it just looks strange.



Using myself as a model didn't work very well either! But you get the idea. I have already pulled it out in the evening when the sun went down and we were sitting outside, and it was perfect for that. Light, and soft, but lovely and warm.



Apparently you can try and shape things on the loom to make them a bit more shawl-like. I'm going to investigate further because I don't see how it could possibly work....

Reading

I went down the beach for the weekend, just on my own. It was a bit unexpected to have no social events this close to Christmas, but that's the way it worked out. Number two son had three performances of his Christmas play, but he wasn't super keen for us to come and watch it, so we didn't. He did want us to go and see his Sunday night performance to mark the end of his script-writing course. There were seven teenagers in the course and they did moved readings of all of their scripts - all less than ten minutes and some of them were very good. Mostly funny, some dramatic, some weird. I thought my son's was the best in both plot and words but I think I might be biased.

So at the beach I did absolutely nothing. Didn't sew, didn't turn out a cupboard, didn't go for any long walks. Both nights had massive electrical storms and incredibly heavy rain, but the days were pleasant and I went for two swims. The waves were decent but the water was quite churned up which means you can't see your feet ... so both swims ended after about an hour when I stepped on something that wriggled off. Probably a flounder, but I always think of those massive string-rays around in the river and get nervous.

Between swimming and eating I just lay about and read. It was wonderful. I recently finished Juliet Barker's biography of the Brontes, which is just over a thousand pages of closely written detail about their lives, starting with Patrick Bronte and ending after Charlotte's death. I usually like biographies with less detail and more raciness, but this kept me engaged through the whole thing. I had read Mrs Gaskell's biography ages ago, when I was having a Gaskell moment, rather than a Charlotte Bronte moment, so I've known one version, but not the full story.

Barker's biography covers all of them, but focuses a lot on Charlotte - I suppose because she did the most, and certainly wrote the most letters. I had always ordered the sisters by my preference for the books - Wuthering Heights as the runaway favourite, followed by the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and then Jane Eyre a distant third... but reading the biography  made me re-think and, which is the point of this way too meandering paragraph, realise I had never read Villette.  And that is what I did this weekend, and it was really really good. Spot-on psychologically; which is surprising and humbling, after having read this biography and realising the Brontes were probably not the kind of people I would put up with for very long (prickly, self-conscious and awkward). Hidden depths.

Alpaca number two

One unexpected downside of weaving vs quilting is that I can't give the scarves names! Well, I could, but it would be weird and stupid, and the label would be ridiculously large. So I have to say things like "the blue and orange alpaca and wool one" to describe them.

This is a combination of the blue/grey alpaca, and a beautiful variegated orange/yellow wool that my husband bought me back from Berlin. It is a lovely pure wool with a springy twist that was just delightful to weave with. I put two yellow, one blue on the warp, and alternated one yellow and one blue on the weft to get this boxy pattern. Can you see on the ends how tightly twisted the variegated wool is? It made a beautiful woven finish ... I always thought that wool was wool, but the fibre content is only the half of it.

I've put a filter on the close-up photos (I don't usually) because the colours were completely wrong. This is actually more like the colours in real life than the plain photos were. I don't really understand photography and I still haven't got a way to take decent photos of the scarves! I don't think my latest idea (wind them around the handles of the wardrobe door) works at all well.

Mohair number four and alpaca number one

This isn't quite the last ball of mohair, but I think it's the last one I'll do for a while! The warp is the lovely alpaca blend I got at the same time as the mohair, in a very nice denim grey/blue. It went on the loom beautifully.

The warp is alternating mohair and some more of the variegated wool that I used for the felted scarf. The variegation takes ages to repeat when you only use it for every second row, and it looks much more blue than in the other scarves. I suppose that's because of the blue warp, but the other scarves were very pink, and this is hardly pink at all. Just at the ends.



This was a fun weave and made a very snuggly scarf. Not very elegant perhaps, but warm and cuddly. I love the fluffy alpaca tassels.

It's all blurring together

Work, home, socialising, kid's stuff, my stuff, food, shopping... it is all starting to become a bit of a blur. And not a good, three-drinks-in blur, but a scrappy about-to-lose-my-shit kind of blur. Work hasn't slowed down despite the end of the Parliamentary year, and the Christmas tree has been sitting in its box in the middle of the living room floor for eight days. No-one can really be bothered putting it up. My husband dragged it out before he went to Jakarta last week and it's still there.

He is back (had a great time, his work went well) and the dog is back from the vet. She was SO happy to see us, and is very happy to be home. Her surgery went well, but she's not allowed to chase anything, get too excited, go up and down stairs, or go for a walk. So that's kind of ruined her life, but she's so happy at the moment that she doesn't seem to mind. I'll have to take a photo of her leg because they shaved her for surgery and it looks ridiculous - like an eaten chicken drumstick. We've blocked off the stairs with one of the sides of the old cot (why the hell do we still have the cot??? My husband dragged it out of the shed and I thought my head would explode with horror at the crap we must still have in there) and no-one's tripped over it yet.

Here he is wearing a nice Indonesian batik shirt. Saturday we had our traditional Christmas lunch with friends we've been having Christmas lunch with for 24 years. It was a boiling hot day but lovely in the shady back yard playing Finska and having a few wines. My husband took the boys home about six but I stayed on and ubered home a few hours later.... which is an UNHEARD of degree of independent socialising in my universe. Wow, like being a real person briefly.

Mohair number three

This is the third scarf with the mohair - me trying to use up the various ends of things I am accumulating. It didn't work with the mohair (still three more balls!) but I used up the bamboo-wool. It only has bamboo-wool on the warp (cream/blue, cream/gold, cream/blue) then alternating mohair and green bamboo-wool on the weft. It is not very fluffy, but nice and soft and warm, and very quick to weave.

Unbelievably, number one son has finished for the year, after a bit of assessment and exam stress. Not just school but also his university engineering course - where they had to build a Mars rover type thing (I think) and write up the specifications. Except much more complicated than that, involving drafting software and 3-D printers and other things that are quite beyond his poor parents. We couldn't help him at all, although I think Brad volunteered to do some proof reading. I limit myself to telling him how clever he is (which doesn't help, apparently).

I am leaving him some household chores to do but I think he deserves a bit of quiet time, at least this week. Maybe tomorrow when the dog comes back from the vet he can spend his days carrying her up and down the stairs....

Nothing much happening

Oh dear, a week without a post. It's busy at work, I was sick on Friday, my ear is blocked and I keep losing my balance, my dog ate my homework and Mercury is retrograde. All the good stuff. Actually I shouldn't even mention the poor dog because she had surgery for a torn ACL! Just like a footballer, and apparently done exactly the same way - twisting in mid air chasing a ball.

The vet says this means her ball chasing days are over, which is a shame because she loves it. And not able to go up and down stairs for a week or two! I do not know how that will work out, because we have a lot of stairs, and there is no way I'm carrying our fat dog around the house. And that is our Christmas present to each other - my husband and I - a new dog ACL. Broke, again.

Here is a terrible mirror selfie of one of the dresses I made the weekend before last. It does look shapeless, but that is actually my shape (round is a shape). It has a waist seam, and darts, and a shaped centre back seam, but you can't really tell in that fabric. Which came to me, via a workmate, from the stash of an elderly Japanese lady who had to go into care. It is synthetic, but a beautiful heavy synthetic that sewed up really nicely. It had Japanese characters on the selvage. Not the most fashionable garment, but it was comfortable, and colourful.