My current spinning: a scrap of merino/silk from my blending board being spun into a lace-weight 2 ply on my Majacraft Mayan Spinner. It isn’t really the proper prep for a Mayan spinner (you need well carded fibre), but since it’s just a tiny sample I thought I’d persevere with it.
Spinning on a Majacraft Mayan Spinner
It’s a shame Majacraft stopped making these so quickly as they’d be great for spinning on a long train trip.
I’f you’d like to see exactly how to spin on one of these doohickeys, check out this video by k9nething on Youtube.
The Summer flu (well, technically Spring flu but close enough) is currently attempting to kick my voluminous butt, but it hasn’t stopped me almost preparing a Christmas present for my fellow retro style fans.
The Perfection Cuddly Toymaking Kit, Book No. 1
The Perfection Cuddly Toymaking Kit was published in Australia in the early 1950’s as a home education course for women wanting to earn pin money by making toys and gifts and selling them in bulk to local shops.
There are ten booklets in the kit, covering a large range of toys, novelties and bags. If you love retro style toys then you’ll love making the toys straight from the full size patterns, or you can make changes and use them to design updated versions with a more modern look. With all sorts of toys from little felt rabbits to fur fabric penguins, leatherette (or felt) sausage dogs and the obligatory Scotty, to (my favourite) felt flowers and a great knitting/overnight bag to sew, I think you’ll have many of your Christmas presents covered!
Now I just have to stop coughing long enough and I’ll be uploading one booklet per day for ten days. Watch this space for booklet number 1 very soon!
I’ve added over 300 new photos (and a couple of new albums) to my photo gallery!
You can check out places I’ve been, things I’ve made, purchased needlework, more things I’ve made, pets I’ve met, things I’ve made (seriously, I make a lot of stuff), all right here in the photo galleries.
Just a few of the albums with things I have made in them. There are more, I promise.
Knitting-and.com terminally outgrew it’s server over the last couple of weeks so I’ve moved it to a different one with more of everything that makes it go 🙂
I’ve noticed everything is loading much faster for me, I hope it is for you too. If you encounter any errors, please let me know. I, or one of my work colleagues, will get right on it.
One of my colleagues ready for a day’s work.My other colleagues hard at work doing some filing.
My current pile of completed samples looks like this:
A lot of 19th century knitting
No, I wasn’t slacking, I have a very good reason for not being finished yet! I re-read the book. Specifically a section of the book that I thought didn’t have much of use to today’s knitters. It turns out that I had missed some really great stuff so I knit that too. Specifically, all of the blue things. And a beige thing. They’re worth the wait, honest.
I’m currently on the very last 22 repeats of a very skinny edging and then it’s just a matter of a little sewing, a lot of blocking, some photography, a little website coding and then I’m done. I swear! I most definitely will not be knitting samples of the stockings that say cast on 196 stitches with yarn so thin you can’t find it any more on size ridiculous needles. Or the mittens that have you cast on 96 stitches for an infant (OK, I may be making that up but it is a ridiculously large number of stitches for a mitten that’s just going to get chewed and slobbered on).
To be totally truthful, I was tempted to knit the entire beige thing with the original size silk thread on size insanity needles because it’s very pretty but I thought a dk weight sample was more realistic since that (or thicker) will be what most modern knitters will use to make it anyway.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 22 repeats of a 9 stitch wide edging to go. I’d better get to it before you all start thinking I’ve just been swiping these images off Google Images or something…
