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Fibre East … (part 2)

Jul 23rd, 2012 1 Comment

Ok so it’s time to show and tell…… What did I buy at Fibre East?

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Well I simply fell in love with these guys.  I mean how SSSWWEEEEEEEEEETTTTT!!!!!!

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I especially loved this guy.  Look at those horns, just fabulous!  There was a bit of a squee moment when I discovered that you could buy a kit to make them.  They’re from Manfield Crafts and the wonderful ladies on the stall managed to contain their laughter at my reaction to these little fellas.

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Yarn wise my main purchase was some beautiful silk from Copperfield Yarns.  Unfortunately I can’t find a website for this yummy yarn but if anyone knows one then please point me in the right direction.  I was drawn to the copper tones and colours.  At the moment my hair is predominantly black but my natural colour is coppery blonde.  Since I’m planning on going back to my natural colour this seemed the perfect yarn to make myself a shawl.

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I also bought some more dpns for sock production.  I normally use knit pros but the helpful lady at the Crossways Patch / Tall Yarns stand showed me the HiyaHiya ones.  These were of great interest as I have quite a loose tension when knitting and so I’m always on smaller needles than my friends.  The HiyaHiya’s actually go down to less than a millimetre which is much smaller than the smallest knit pros.  In the end I bought 2 packs of 2mm’s (one Knit Pro and one HiyaHiya) and a pack of 3.25 Knit Pros for some DK socks.

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Speaking of DK socks I also picked up a couple of balls of pure wool in a dk weight but without ball bands.  I can’t tell you the stall as I didn’t clock their name.  These aren’t really ‘me’ colours but the socks are destined for my mother and they are very much her colours.  I have to say that I was delighted at how much faster dk socks knit up compared to sock weight yarn socks.  I also had a little bit of yarn left over from these which I’ve used to make a sat nav pouch.

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Then lastly I bought some buttons.

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Yes, I know they will probably just sit in my sewing box but they were so pretty… and cute… and shiny… and I just had to have a few……

Fibre East… (Part 1)

Jul 18th, 2012 Leave a comment

 

This last weekend I went with friends to Fibre East. Due to other commitments we had decided upon the Sunday in advance and given the weather this seemed to be a good move.

So we duly met up and headed west, in fact we seemed to go a long way west for something with east in the title, but we had money in our pockets and a list of things we were hoping to find. We knew from Ravelry that it was likely to be muddy but hey what’s a little mud between friends when yarn is involved. This year we hoped would be bigger and better than the first event last year, we weren’t disappointed.

I had decided to take to try and take some shots of all the yumminess on offer. As is my custom I always tried to ask permission before snapping away and this was where I got my biggest surprise of the day. At places like Ally Pally I can pretty much guarantee that most stall holders will be very definitely against photography. Grumpily so. But here every single person I asked smiled and say yes. How wonderful. I’ve never understood the attitude you get at the big shows about this. I mean what exactly do these people think I’m going to do with the images?

Anyway here are some shots from the wonderful stall holders who were happy for me to use my camera. Oh and what did I buy? I’ll take some photos and blog about that later in the week. ;)

Fibre East…. (Part 2)

Jul 28th, 2011 1 Comment

Earlier in the week I posted about our road trip to Fibre East and I did promise to show you what I bought.  Well some of it Winking smile

Given we finally have some nice sunshine I decided to take my cache outside into the garden and photograph it all in natural light in a vain attempt to get more accurate colours.  I had this mad idea of arranging them artily on my patio table and leisurely sitting on one of my chairs and clicking away with my camera – perhaps with a cup of tea beside me.

Errr it didn’t quite work.  My table had blown over and when I lifted it upright spiders, earwigs and all sorts of creepy crawlies started dropping out of it.  I didn’t scream (much) or run for the garden broom (well not very fast as I was worried about tripping over)…  Anyway I retreated to another part of the garden and felt much safer. 

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First up is some beautiful Merino Blend from The Threshing Barn.  This wonderful stand also had the Louet spinning wheels on which had me dribbling so.  Oh I have no intention of replacing the one I have – love him to bits – but it’s nice to look.

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After my run in with the spiders I ended up putting my goodies next to one of my cat ornaments and when taking the shots of the fibre I just couldn’t resist giving her a fibre scarf for a few minutes…

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This is some other undyed fibre I picked up.  Unfortunately I can’t work out which stand it came from since it was loose with no sticker Sad smile

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Then there was dribbling at the Purl Alpaca Designs stand.  I’ve been eyeing up one of their designs ‘Olivia’ for a while and just couldn’t resist buying the pattern.  Actually no, scrub that, I promised I wouldn’t buy anymore patterns till I’d knitted some of the existing ones up….  So lets rephrase.  I was walking past this stand when a pattern jumped off it’s shelf and assaulted me.  It kept hitting me repeatedly until I agreed to buy it and take it home…  (You don’t believe me?  Meh, it was worth a try and I wouldn’t believe a lame story like that either)  The photos above are taken with permission from their website.  I have to admit that I’m a sucker for long cardigans / coats and how could I resist this one.  They had samples made up which you could try on and this highlighted that I would need to knit a different sized front to back.  Narrow back and big boobs strike again!

I bought lots of other stuff as well, such as some more circular cables and a few presents, but I won’t bore you with all of them.  It was a great day out and I’m sure we’ll be going back next year…

Fibre East… (Part 1)

Jul 25th, 2011 Leave a comment

This past weekend was Fibre East and we decided to have a little road trip.  So we piled into my car we set off westwards (I’m sure something called Fibre East should actually be in the east not central England but hey ho).

We had a little fun and games with the satnav as we knew the fastest route involved going along the A120 to Stansted airport.  However, despite buying updated maps from Tomtom, many of the bypasses are still not appearing almost 10 years after they were built!  Add in that the voice on my satnav is a ‘cylon’ from the original series of Battlestar Galactica that thinks roundabouts are called traffic circles and I’m sure you get the picture.

Anyway we eventually made it to fibre nirvana.

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There were marques full of yarnnie and fibery scuminess….

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Sheep shearing being demonstrated…

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Beautiful things to look at and buy…

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and spinning wheels to play on (and buy if you wanted).  I loved this stall as they had Louet wheels.  My own is a Louet S10 (the stall holder, whose name I forget cos I’m still so sleepy, told me she finds it hard to get excited about the S10 – but I love him) and I now have a couple of companies to talk to regarding bobbins and replacement flyers etc that I didn’t know about before.

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You could play on the wheels.  I didn’t spin this but loved the mix of colours on the bobbin.  Rather late in the day we also found a ‘play tent’ where you could have a go at carding etc.  I think Ann thought she’d died and gone to fibre heaven in that tent!

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Maytheweed forgot her camera and loaned my phone for the purpose of something nefarious involving sheep.  When she handed it back I ended up with a shot of her feet!   I’ll admit I didn’t take my proper camera as I didn’t know what we would find.  Besides I tend to get a bit preoccupied with the Canon in my hands and forget about things, like watching where I’m walking…

There was also lots of tea drinking and HUGE jacket potatoes for lunch.

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All to soon it was over and the long trek home began. Once home I hid my treasured purchases in the dining room away from inquisitive noses and flopped on sofa with my knitting, a very happy Pebbles curled up next to me.  Bliss…

I’ll do another post on what I spent all my pennies on later…