Blue

Life has been complicated and blogging ended up in the too-hard basket. Strangely, once I'd missed a few days getting back into routine seemed even harder. Anyway, here I am back again. I have been spinning and knitting as usual despite the long silence here.

One bit of excitement: Sussex Neighbourhood House is participating in the Coburg Carnivale yarnstorming of Coburg Mall. As if the opportunity to participate wasn't enticing enough, our theme colours just happen to be based around the colour BLUE. Funnily enough I was able to find a fair bit in my stash collection to contribute. I won't be doing a lot of knittting for this, but I did have fun with an extra large twisted cord.

It's late autumn in Melbourne, which means lots of grey skies, rain, rain and more rain. That's perfect weather for sitting in the armchair with some nice yarn. There are hats, wristies and a couple of blankets in the queue.

Another Little Twist

I've been working at adding a few brighter touches to my wardrobe. Last week it was a pair of wristwarmers and matching hat in blue and red. I had a little bit of that yarn left over, not really enough for another project, but I wanted to make something of it. Here's what I did:
I added some black yarn and made a twisted cord. Then I wrapped the two ends together to make a tassel and dressed it up with some beads. I haven't worn it yet. It was made in a burst of creativity before I left for Bendigo on Saturday. I'm a bit ambivalent about it: does it look too much like curtain tie back? I guess I won't really know how it works for me until I put it on and wear it around for a bit. Anyway it was fun and used up the last of that batch of yarn. Now today I'd like to do some dyeing as well as find a bit more space amongst the chaos. And I'd better get some paperwork sorted.

Twister

Here's the twisted cord twister that I bought on Saturday: It's a basic little bit of engineering. The crocodile clips are to grab onto the yarn. You then hold the larger block of wood steady and turn the smaller block in a circle. The clips spin in the same direction and add twist to your yarn. When there's enough twist the pieces of yarn are tied together and there you have a twisted cord. I expect it will be a lot easier than twisting the yarn in my fingers, but it's still not rocket science. I'm trying to work out a way to connect it to my cordless drill . . . without overwhelming the poor little thing so that it shakes itself to pieces!

Power Tools

I ended up using my power drill to make the twisted cord for the bag. I was working with short lengths and wanted lots of twist. So this worked better for me than mucking around on the spinning wheel. This is a cordless drill which has been retired from active duty in household maintenance and is seeing out it's days in semi-retirement with my textiles. I also use it to wind bobbins for my weaving.

More is More

I've been playing with possibilities for the twisted cord to finish off this evening bag. I think in this case more is more!


The cord on the far right is 16 of the singles progressively twisted together. I think that will do. It will have to do because I only spun up a small amount of the choc-orange singles and now they're all gone. The chocolates are all gone too, but that I can fix:)