Hoping …

Fingers crossed that in another week we can get together again, with our Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning meetings happening! Meanwhile, here’s a bit of virtual show-and-tell.

First, a couple of photos I meant to put in last time – blame lockdown brain-fog!

Now the recent news – Patrizia has been having some excitement. She created a dress to enter in the WoolOn competition held at Tarras near Alexandra.

She used yarn made from the wool of her own sheep, crocheted in a lot of single pieces and then sewn together. She says her starting point was the sleeves and then the dress was built around them.

The fascinator was also made from the crocheted pieces, which she glued and dried on a bottle to give them the right shape. She then glued them onto a headband covered in the same wool.
And did you notice the boots? They are also covered the same wool, knitted and with one piece of crochet incorporated in the front of each.

Here’s my favourite photo, taken by Patrizia in her woolshed.
The feathers in the fascinator, by the way, are from a pheasant that Rob shot in their back garden in the U.K.

They just managed to get home with two hours to spare before the lockdown started! If you want to find out a little more about WoolOn, and see a short movie of some of the other entries, here’s a link:
https://www.thenews.co.nz/arts-entertainment/woolon-event-surpasses-expectations/

Also, a pair of the socks we’ve been seeing Patrizia working on made it into the Lotto ad!

Caroline tried her hand at dyeing carded wool during lockdown, using Earth Palette dyes. They are the ones that you don’t have to boil – you just leave them to soak, avoiding the felting that can happen if you boil carded wool. First she did some light blue in a big dye pot.

Then she laid some white wool (damp) in rows on top of plastic on her felting bench. She squirted the different dye colours at random over the wool, then put another plastic sheet on top and spread the dye into the wool. She left it for a few days for the dye to set. Once set, she rinsed the wool and hung it over the covered raised garden outside to dry.

What is she going to do with it? It’s all for sale!

And how about your editor’s lockdown creations? Well, there’s been quite a lot of writing of newsletters and blogs, but I have done some spinning.

I’m spinning this long-draw on my beloved Norwegian wheel.

Then I chain-ply (which I’m steadily getting better at – thanks Lynette!) because the colour changes are very long and I wanted to shorten them while keeping them gradual. I use my little Fleur for that because it has bigger bobbins.

What will it be? I’ve no idea.

Finally, have you ever heard of anyone spinning molten glass? It can be done (well, sort of) and here’s the evidence from Helsinki: Anna Mlasowsky spinning molten glass on a Finnish wheel.
https://www.annamlasowsky.com/heritage
Click on the right-hand arrow to see a series of photos of the process and the results. I was relieved to see that she doesn’t thread the hot glass through the orifice!