Yesterday at Spun

Yesterday being Thursday, I went to my local yarn shop, Spun, for the regular knit-and-natter session.  Lydia has a display of winter knits in the window, including two sweaters from the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  I showed both of them in December at the Guild branch meeting on picture knits (see here).

They work well in the display, because the backs of both are interesting as well as the fronts - the bird tracks across the back of the robin sweater, and 'ICY' on the polar bear one.

(Though I don't really understand why anyone should want to have 'ICY' written across their back.)

Several people at Spun had already signed up to the Mystery Knit ALong that's being run by Sarah Alderson and Ann Kingstone, and were choosing two colours of 4-ply yarn for it in the shop.

The Knit Along is a pair of fingerless mitts - you'll find it on Ravelry if you search for a pattern called On the Other Hand.  There will be three stages, with two choices at each stage, one designed by Ann and one by Sarah, so there are 8 different combinations altogether.  (Or 16 if you make the thumb cuff and the hand cuff different, though personally I wouldn't.  Or 16 x 16 if you knit each mitt independently, though personally I think that would be daft.)

The description of the pattern on Ravelry includes the tags:  cables, corrugated ribbing, slipped stitches, stranded, twisted stitches  -  none of which are an essential part of a fingerless mitts pattern.  So it's going to be complicated.

I signed up for the Knit Along when I got home.  I'm already knitting a scarf in 4-ply in a dark teal colour, and will have some left over, so that's one of my colours.  Not entirely sure yet about the other.  The first instalment of the pattern was due to be released at 11 this morning - haven't looked yet.  Very exciting!
   

Fair Isles on Display

Lydia, at Spun Yarn Shop in Huddersfield, has revamped her window display this month.  In July and August, it was filled with summer knitting, but now that the school holidays are over, it didn't look appropriate, and so she has switched to Fair Isles in autumnal colours.

I was thrilled to see that two of the garments in the display are ones that I knitted!  I lent them to Lydia when she started stocking Jamieson's Spindrift wool from Shetland - she wanted to be able to show customers some of the things that you can knit with it.

John's pullover (on the stand on the right in the window) appeared in my very first blog post.

On the left is a sweater I knitted for myself.  I haven't worn it for years, but it does look very good - maybe I should reconsider it when Lydia changes her display again.

The patterns for both came from  Sarah Don's book on Fair Isle Knitting, published in 1979.  And I bought Jamieson's yarn for them, directly from the Shetlands (ordered by post, which seems very quaint now).

In the corner of the window are some of Elizabeth Smith's beautiful cushions, knitted in Spindrift and then felted.

And higher up, Lydia has hung a multi-coloured wheel of Spindrift.

You can see how difficult it was to take good photos - the lights and the rest of the shop are reflected in the window, and through it you can see the opposite side of the arcade.  Or v,v. if you stand outside the shop. But I think you can also see how nice the new shop is - when Spun opened nearly five years ago, it was on the 2nd floor of the Byram Arcade, but Lydia moved down to the ground floor a few months ago - so much more accessible, light and spacious.  

New premises for Spun

Nearly 5 years ago, a new yarn shop opened in Huddersfield, in the Byram Arcade.  Since then, Spun has flourished, and yesterday Lydia  (the owner) moved into new premises.

The shop is still in the Byram Arcade, but is now on the ground floor instead of the second floor, where it will be more visible and easier to find.  The ground floor of the arcade is always busy, and just a few yards away on the other side of the arcade are the Blue Rooms, the cafe where the Huddersfield branch of the Knitting & Crochet Guild meets.  So it will all be much more convenient for local knitters!

Inside, it feels light and spacious, with the huge window onto the arcade.  The previous occupiers had painted the walls dark red - white is a great improvement.   The stairs lead to a mezzanine area, for workshops and knitting groups (where I'll be spending Thursday mornings in future).

   
The shop window looks very festive, with a woolly bike (something to do with the Tour de France 2014, I think) and a rocking chair decorated by local students.   

And there were some new yarns in stock for the opening - very enticing.  Congratulations, Lydia - I wish you every success in the new shop.

A Wedding Dress and Buttons

Lydia and Ash are now back from their honeymoon, so Lydia's knitted wedding dress, which I wrote about last month here,  is now on display in the window of her yarn shop in the Byram Arcade.  There was an article about it in the local paper, the Huddersfield Examiner, with a photo of her wearing it.  I went to the usual Thursday Knit and Natter at the shop this morning and took photos of the dress. 

I wrote in March that I bought some Fimo jewellery from my friend Steph.  She is developing the techniques that she uses all the time, and now produces some wonderfully intricate results.  She brought a new batch of jewellery and buttons to the shop this morning.  A lot of really pretty brooches and earrings, and the buttons were irresistible.

The photo shows just a few of the buttons.  I felt that I should immediately plan lots of knitting - a cardigan with a single large important button, for instance.  It was a hard choice, but in the end I picked the card of two rectangular buttons in the photo.   I might make a collar/cowl/neckwarmer thing - something with two buttons to fasten it.    I'll look for some thick yarn that picks up the colours in the buttons.

 

If you should be in Huddersfield, do go and see Lydia's wedding dress.  And you will find a selection of Steph's Crafty Bits in the shop. 

Knit, Natter, Have a party

There is a knit-and-natter session every Thursday at the Spun shop in Huddersfield, which opened just over a year ago.   Yesterday, the  knit-and-natter regulars had a Christmas party.     Everyone brought some food  (all excellent), and there were Christmas crackers and mulled wine.   Lydia had made up a goody bag for everyone from the shop, with knitting patterns, some buttons, a magazine, a balloon, ....    And several people had brought hand-made gifts and cards for everyone, which was lovely.     We all got Christmas tree ornaments and a pair of stitch markers (the colour chosen to suit each person, so mine are purple - I do knit quite a lot of purple!)

Good food, good company, and we even did some knitting - it was a really good do.

Dyeing Workshop

On Saturday, I went to a dyeing workshop at Spun, my local yarn shop.  The tutor was Debbie Tomkies, of DT Craft and Design.  It was huge fun - an opportunity to play with colours and messy liquids, with a practical result at the end of it.  I was surprised at how easy and quick the dyes are to use - the only dyeing I have done before involved heating pans of dye on the hob, but on Saturday, we only needed  to microwave the yarn once it had been soaked in the cold dye.    

There were 6 students in the workshop and it was fascinating to see the different ranges of colours that we liked.  I kept to greens, blues and purples, but others used very bright colours, yellows and reds.

Our finished results

I came home with three small skeins of lace-weight wool and a 100g skein of merino and nylon sock yarn.


I dyed one of the lace-weight skeins in a mixture of greens.  I laid out the wet skein on a J-cloth, with a plastic sheet underneath, and squirted the dye directly onto the yarn using a syringe - a satisfyingly reckless process.  Then you pat each section of yarn gently so that the adjacent colours mingle and there are no undyed sections. 

I dyed the other skeins by putting beakers of mixed dye into a big plastic tub. Then you drape the wet yarn over the beakers, so that as much yarn as possible is immersed in dye - the yarn loops into one beaker, then over into the next beaker and so on. [Why didn't I take a photo?]

I dyed  the remaining two lace-weight skeins in purples, blues and greens. I used the same beakers of dye twice, because when the first skein had been dyed, there was still quite a lot of the dye left.  I like the more pastel effect a lot  - I think another time I would use a weaker dye solution in the first place.      

Finally, I dyed the sock yarn using the beaker method with mixtures of red and turquoise dyes, in varying proportions to give a range of purples.   Being a very inexpert dyer, it didn't come out quite as I intended.  I made the dye solution stronger than I intended, again.  And there are some small patches between the different colours where the yarn is sometimes hardly dyed at all, and also some small areas which are pure turquoise with no red at all - maybe I didn't mix the dye thoroughly enough.  But I think that the lighter patches are in the end a good thing - otherwise the overall effect would be too dark.

Even if I envisaged a different end-result, I really like how it has turned out in my knitted sample.  And the yarn is beautifully soft.  I plan to knit a pair of socks with it, and fingerless mittens for me if there is enough left.  




 
It was a really good day - I had fun and learnt a lot. I'll buy some dye from Debbie and try it at home some time (only when I have reduced my stack of half-finished knitting, though).

Rag Rugging

On Saturday I went to a Rag Rugging workshop at Spun, the yarn shop in town.  In fact, we were working on cushion covers rather than rugs and using chunky yarn rather than rags, but the idea was to teach us the techniques so that we can move on to proper rag rugging if we want.

I wanted my cushion to be in dark reds and blues, and designed a kind of heraldic rose.  A rose should have five petals, but I gave it four because the cushion is square,  so it's a quatrefoil, I suppose.

The backing is hessian - when rag rugs were commonly made in this area, I suppose hessian sacks would have been easily available, but now you have to buy it from craft suppliers.  By the end of the workshop, I had finished the outer petals and the centre of the flower, and was trying out a blue for the background.

 
The petals will be finished in a lighter red, and the background will be done in squiggles of two shades of dark blue,  to give an intermediate colour and a livelier effect than using all one shade. (And the loose ends will be trimmed off, of course.)

It is quite a quick technique, and I am pleased with what I have done so far.  It was interesting to see how different the results were around the workshop - ranging from extremely neat and even, like a carpet, to deliberately uneven and shaggy. And the designs were very different, too, of course.

The teacher (Claire Lea) brought in some rags (strips of wool cut from a machine-made jumper) so that we could try them out.  She had brought in one of her rugs to show us, and it was very attractive.  The different fabrics she had used give a lot of variation in texture as well as colour.  It's also a very practical technique - her rug is ten years old and has been used on the floor all that time,  but doesn't look worn.  And it's easy to mend a rag rug just by re-doing any damaged bit.  But I don't think I will abandon knitting for rag-rugging.  I just wanted to try it out, and I think that one cushion will be enough for me. 

New Yarn Shop in Town

Today was the Grand Opening of a new yarn shop in Huddersfield town centre, in the Byram Arcade.  The owner is Lydia, who set up the Huddersfield knitters group that meets on Tuesday evenings in the bar of the George Hotel (home of Rugby League). 

The shop is called Spun and (of course)  has hand-knitted shop signs.

It is a lovely shop - spacious and light, with a gorgeous array of yarns.  There is a separate room for demonstrations and workshops - today there was a spinning demonstration. I'm looking forward to the workshops - there is one planned for November on dyeing, though I am trying to convince myself that I'm quite busy enough knitting ready-made yarn without taking up spinning and dyeing as well. 

 
There is a table and chairs by the window in the main shop, looking down onto Westgate (the shop is on the 2nd floor).  I sat there with my knitting, chatting to other knitters and shoppers - it will be a handy place to drop in while I'm in town.   It was good to see so many people there today.  

Byram Arcade is a Victorian building with shops on three floors. There are other interesting independent shops in the arcade, including a delicatessen and cafe on the ground floor, and a very nice restaurant on the first floor of the Cook and Bakeware Company shop (my sister's favourite).  

Lydia stocks some wonderful yarns, including Artesano and Manos del Uruguay.  She is specialising in British yarn as well - there is a range of Blue-faced Leicester yarn in some gorgeous colours, for instance.  She has a selection of KnitPro needles, too, that might convert me to knitting on circular needles, if anything can.   Lots of temptation.  I shall have to hurry up and finish my current projects so that I have a reason to buy more yarn.