Pink Latte Anyone ?

This yummy fibre is made from milk, pretty incredible really.

It's called Latte.

(More about it if you are interested, here)

It's in the dypeot with some silk. This was an afterbath of some bright pink yarn I dyed.

And here it is naked, as it were.

When I was a kid at primary school in the UK we had a free milk programme, as per the 1946 School Milk Act and were FORCED to drink 1/3 of a pint each day. I hated it and have never liked to drink milk  since.

This is a much better format !

Here's my little dye station set up outside.

And here are the results.

First Post of 2010

Let's hope I keep it up !

Anyway, hope your New Year/New Decade will be everything you want it to be !

For the first day of the new decade we went out to Saltery Bay.

It's so pretty.

It was breezy and warm today.

Not quite a polar bear swim but Tika got her feet wet.

We went on  a small detour and drove down to the powerhouse at Stillwater. It's a pretty art deco building, built in 1930.  Could do with a coat of paint but quite charming just the same.

I was out looking for lichens today to do some dyeing. I found some but I'll post pictures another time once I figure out what I picked up and whether they are good varieties to dye with.

So that's it for now.

What-I-Did-Over-The-Christmas-Holidays

Well not much actually !

Which is fine by me.
The 23rd of December is our wedding anniversary so to celebrate we went to Texada Island for the day.

We went to Shelter Point.

And found these little wild blueberries.

We had lunch at the Tree Frog restaurant which is a favourite of ours. As always they made us very welcome and we had a great lunch.

Here are a few more things that I did.

Carded some batts.

Spun up this skein of Babydoll/Romney plied with Angora.

I don't always give my skeins a name but this one is called Jane Eyre.

Made this pink hat which flew off to Europe.

Knitted up these legwarmers for a little gift.

And knitted this sheep hat for me, based on a pattern by Melissa Burt, using my handspun wool.

There's more, but  I'll show you another day.

Today I'm back to work.

Merry "<<_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _>>" *

* Please insert your own preferred holiday.

 Around here that would be Christmas,

 as you can see by our charlie brown tree.

There's even a rabbit under it.

And look at this lovely weaving bench Simon gave me for Christmas.

.

Our friend Randy made it from hemlock.

It is just the right height and feels great to sit on

so I'm feeling quite inspired to weave something !

so on that note,

Merry

 politically correct ,non denominational winterfest type holiday,

and a happy new gregorian calendar reset

from all of us at Periwinkle.

A Few F.O.'s

HAH ! I bet you weren't expecting two posts in two days.

Just making up for the quiet times......

I did manage to FINISH a few things I thought I'd show you.

I made this little hat from some of my hand spun wool from our Babydoll sheep.


This one is an adaptation for someone who requested a small tea cosy. It has slits for the handle and spout and a tie at the top.

I made this hat for Simon on the knitting machine, (mostly). I finished the top decreasing by hand. It is handspun with the logo of his favourite bike manufacturer on it !!

This hat is a pattern by Veronik Avery. It's all short rows and very important to keep track of where you are, (ask me how I know, which is why it stayed UNFINISHED for so long).

And a scarf from Sally Melville's Knit Stitch book. I really like this pattern it's knit lengthwise increasing each row so you get a gradual triangle then you cast on a bunch of stitches each side for the rest of the scarf. They are VERY long rows, but only a few of them so not so bad. It's very wearable.

Camping at Saltery Bay

We had a great night camping with our friends Wayne and Karen Sunday night.

We went out to Saltery Bay Provincial Campground. Here is a link if you want to take a look.

This is how it looked Monday morning with the sun coming up.

Tika had a good time, doing what she does best, lying around !

And here is a constellation of starfish at low tide,

that's the collective noun for starfish (according-to-the-internet-must-be-true).

And just because I thought this looked like a starfish, here is a pic of some bread I baked the other day. I wanted buns and a loaf of bread so combined the two. We broke off the buns and then had the loaf for the next day.

All The Fun Of The Fair

....Yes, it's been embarassingly silent on the blog front lately, but I'm still here, just been busy (and quiet) I suppose.

Last weekend was our community's Fall Fair. Always a great event.

Here is our Granary set up with fresh baked bread and ready to mill organic grains into flour.

Here is a very shady shot of my friend Helene at our fibre booth. All kinds of lovely woven items and fibrey goodness for sale!Here is a shot of our fine arts group who participated in a sheep to shawl demonstration.BUT, the highlight of the Fair for me was Saffy winning a first place ribbon in the rabbit competition. There were mostly meat rabbits so the organizers created a special "Wool Doe" category for her. She's in a class of her own that one !!

So without further ado..... (imaginary drum roll)......

Let me introduce you to Saffy, the prize winning bun.

She's very proud of herself. As you can see if you squint hard enough I printed up a little "Bio" for her and a sample of spun yarn and a mini knitted sweater to show people she's a fibre grower.

Anyway enough for now as Blogger is being particularly badly behaved today in the formatting department