We went to Germany

Last week we went to Germany for the H & H trade show in Cologne.
Its a massive show, Europe's version of TNNA.
This blog post is the photographic story of our trip.

We left on Wednesday morning for a 13 hour drive from Exmoor to Cologne.
We crossed the Channel via the Channel Tunnel, we've used the tunnel before but never as freight.
It was a bit of an education because we were in with all the big container lorries.
This is us in the queue waiting to board.

The check-in was all automatic and done by touch screen, the trouble was the screens were lorry height, Phil had to stand on the seat in the van to reach the English button, the lorry driver's behind us weren't impressed with how slow we were.
This is the train, we expected side's, but there weren't any. Once we'd parked we were told to get out of the van, board a mini bus that took us to the driver's carriage. We were both a bit worried that the van would fall off mid tunnel

But all was fine, we got off the train drove past Brussels in evening rush hour and snow on the German border.

Thursday was set up day.

Our lovely friend's and neighbour's shared half the stand.

I was still sewing in ends of the spiral blanket hopeing it would look ok on the wall.

And it did. Lecchi and the nameless spiral will both be in my triangles book later in the year, so it was lovely to see them together.

We were really pleased with the finished stand and so were our customer's.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were show day's. We were so busy we I didn't have time to take any photo's except this one. It's taken from the car park on the roof of the exhibition centre.
We met lots and lots of lovely customer's, I'm happy to say our wool will be stocked in lots more shops around the world.

And then Monday we came home again, another 13 hour drive, we did have a brief stop in a hypermarket at Calais. I say brief, but it wasn't! We were there for at least 2 hours, I struggled to get Phil out of this aisle.

And then back to work on Tuesday, there really is no peace for the wicked.....

My new baby - Tinkerbell

If you've been reading my blog for a while you will know that our "Ted bad poodle" died early in the new year.
I miss him very much, he was my walking partner, but the time has come to try and fill the Ted shaped space.
I'm really excited to announce I have found my new baby.
She's the one with the fat white tummy.

Her name is Tinkerbell.

She is a Whippet/Bedlington Lurcher.
If you search google images HERE you can see what she will probably look like, she's a rough coat so hopefully will look like a small wolf hound.

I've stolen this image from a dog breed site which you can find HERE

Tinkerbell is 6 weeks old so I can't have her until the end of April. I'm so excited and broody, luckily we have 2 shows inbetween now and then so time will fly by.
We will come home from Wonderwool on the sunday evening and on monday morning we will drive to the bottom of Cornwall to pick up Tinkerbell..
Coincidently at the same time last year we were driving to our new life on Exmoor.

Prepare yourselves for lots and lots more puppy photo's in the very near future.
And I will carry on dreaming of my new life with my Tinkerbell, loving and cuddling her and also training her to be a good girl so she can come to work aand meet all our lovely visitors.

Emergency crochet

I haven't posted since February, its not that I don't have anything to say, its just that I'm too busy to say it.
Spring is a very busy time for us, we have 3 show's in a row all within the space of 8 weeks.
Plus all our clubs, wholesale and updating the website.

We are off to Cologne, Germany on wednesday for show number 2, its a trade show so is slightly different to the other 2.
But it means we need 1 skein of each colour way in all the yarns, thats about 170 skeins all dyed seperately, so as you can imagine Dais and I have been dyeing for England.
Last year we had our lollipop tree for the stand which wowed the customers.
I knew we needed something extra special for the stand, but last week I had no idea what and time was running out
The dyeing and update was finished by last friday, so I had 3 day's to come up with something amazing.

Luckily I had already started playing with a new blanket design, which I was going to keep secret for my new triangle book in the summer.
I started playing about a week ago, but hadn't really done much as I have other things I need to do.

Thursday night I made the decision that as I didn't have any other inspiration that I would have to get my secret blanket to a size that could be shown on the stand and big enough to wow the customers.

So I have been crocheting all weekend, and I mean all weekend.
The photo's are all a bit rubbish as they are taken with my iphone.

Friday morning it looked like this

And Saturday morning it looked like this

Saturday night

And last night at about 9.30

I then had to crochet all the little blue filler circles and eventually after crocheting for 16 hours I went to bed at 1 am, I still haven't sewn in the ends, but if I thread them all through onto the back I think I can fake it.
It measures about 30 inches from side to side and when I come home from Germany I will turn it into a bed sized blanket which was my original intention.
The blanket will be velcro'ed on the the stand wall so hopefully no one will notice.
At the moment its wet and blocking in the dyeroom, I hope its dry by tomorrow night as we need to pack it for its debut in Cologne.

Update's

Did you know I spend at least 2 day's every week preparing for NDS's Thursday night's wool update?
After all the yarn is tied, mordanted, dyed, dried and re-wound it ends up in a box beside my desk.
The tieing, mordanting, dyeing, drying and re-winding processes take at least a week, so we are now about to start dyeing for an update in the middle of March.

Anyway back to the pile.....
Daisy labels it all and then I sort it into different yarn types.
I take 2 skeins of each colour/yarn type and photograph them.
I take the photo's just inside the dyeroom door, so they get as much natural light as possible, if its too sunny there are too many shadow's and it its too cloudy the photo's are dull.
I take at least 3 photo's of each pair of skeins.
I load them onto my computer, sort through the photo's and delete the ones that aren't perfect until I end up with 1 photo of each pair.
Then I spend hours and hours on Photoshop trying to make sure the photo colours are as close to the real life skein.
I have a daylight bulb in the light above my desk, I'm not sure if it makes much difference, but its there anyway.
Some of the photo's need a massive amount of editing, it was too dull this week and I ended up spending  a whole day on the photo's alone.
The photo below is the before and after shots of Lynbridge 38 Angelus 4 ply.

Once the photo's are taken I load them onto FLICKR for the preview and then TWEET the link.
The tweet is automatically posted in NDS's FACEBOOK group.

After a bit of social networking (chat) I make new listings on the site and add all the yarn, depending on the update it takes inbetween 2 to 3 hours. They all go in the NEW THIS WEEK section, as well as their individual catergories.

Then I do some more social networking (chatting), sometimes posting a photo here and there.

On the day of the update I send out the mailing list mail - HERE is this week's and tweet it, which in turn facebook's it.
I remove last week's yarn from its extra sections and delete anything that's sold out, sometimes I forget to do this, so end up doing it while I'm doing the update, which causes huge confusion.
And then I do some more chatting about yarn.
Stupidly I always forget to blog about it and never remember to post it on Ravelry.
I think Ravelry is covered as most of our Ravelry girls are mailing list member's.
There is a sign up link to the mailing list at the top on the left hand side of this blog, so I'm sure some of my blog reader's are member's, so I think most people get to see my pretty yarn at some time during the week.

Then I forget about the update for a few hours and do some design work or dyeing.
I have my alarm set for 6.30 pm so I don't forget to do the update, at 6.59 pm my finger is hovering over the reveal button. Several clicks later and the yarn is revealed.
Sometimes I sit and watch the orders roll in and sometimes I turn off my laptop and eat my dinner - I forgot to tell you Homer normally manages to coincide dinner being ready at 7 pm on a Thursday night?
I don't know if he forgets or just thinks it funny to see me trying to click buttons while trying to avoid spilling food on my laptop keyboard.

My update job is done for another week and I have a few day's off until Monday morning when I start preparing for the next update.

And here's a bit more yarn porn of what's coming up tonight, between mouthful's flan or pasta or curry or something really sloppy. Sloppy is brilliant at slipping between keyboard keys....sigh.......