Book Blanket's & Kaleidoscope.

I'm working on 3 blankets at the moment and I can't share any of them, its very frustrating as I'm really excited and I'd love to know what you think, so.......

But I can tell you a little bit about what I'm doing.

1 - Kaleidoscope 2014
I finished it last night, I have a few ends to sew in and a couple of rounds to do around the edge.
I've been working on this for 6 month's, and it feels like a major achievement.
It normally takes me about 2 months to make a blanket, but I've had to stop every round and photograph it and write the pattern.

This photo was of October, the light has washed some of the colour out so I'm happy to share it as I don't think it gives too much away.

2 - Book blanket no 1

Has been on hold for a few weeks, I finished about 1/3rd of it.

The trouble was I got so excited about book blanket no 2 that I had to work on it instead of no1

3 - Book blanket no 2

Is now on hold until I finish the Kaleidoscope, its sitting on the back of the sofa calling my name.

It's over half finished, I started it when we came back from Unravel at the end of February, so I've been working on it for 5 weeks.

As soon as the Kaleidoscope is finished (maybe tonight) I will go back to it.

Its a double bed size made in 4 ply, so is going to take a lot longer than normal.

Here's a photo, there are more, but they give the colour away so I'll wait until my publishers have approved them.

I am now about 12 weeks into my blanket book schedule.

I should have finished one and be close to finishing the second, but all I have to show for 12 weeks work is 2 half finished blankets.

I'm a bit panicky about time, but as book blanket no 3 is going to be a sofa throw made with DK it should be a lot quicker to make and help me catch up.

Wedding anniversary & Wonderwool

As you may or may not know we are moving house (again!) in 2 weeks time, so we have been packing all our possessions.
I have 2 big packing trunks full of family treasure, old school reports, my teddy bear, my babies first shoes, our wedding photo album and lots and lots of birthday, valentines and anniversary cards.
While looking through the treasure and reading some of the cards I noticed that several times I had written about the fact we only had X amount of years left before we could have a big party and celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.
I didn't necessarily want all the silver gifts I just wanted to celebrate with the people we love.

On the 26th of April  Phil and I will have been happily married for 28 years, we got married in 1986 on the day Chernobyl blew up, although we didn't know it at the time.
We were both young, Phil was 23 and I was 22, looking at the photo below makes me realize how young and innocent we were.
Like any married couple we have had our ups and down's, some very major downs, but we have come through it together and are still best friends, we spend most of our time together, rely on each other, laugh and just enjoy being together.
I am really proud of us, especially as I don't think I have any friends who have been married as long as us.

But we never celebrate our anniversary as we are always working.

Wonderwool is always held over our anniversary weekend, so we are on the stand chatting and selling yarn to our lovely customers.

Although a few years ago Wonderwool were very thoughtful and held the show 2 weeks early, it was the year of our 25th anniversary and so I was really happy.

We didn't have the party as we didn't have the time or money, but we did have a lovely celebration Thai meal with Phil's parents for lunch, the 26th is Phil's mum's birthday so it was a joint celebration. 

But I must of eaten a bad prawn as by mid afternoon I was being very, very sick with food poisoning, I then passed out and had to be taken home to my sofa. I woke mid evening to find poor Phil watching DVD's and eating a frozen pizza. It kind of summed up our life at that time, redundancy, losing the house etc etc etc

I've just been updating the website with this year's show dates and realised that on the big day we will be yet again standing on the stand selling yarn and chatting to our lovely customer's.

I'm seriously thinking of putting up some streamers and drinking champagne all day, but I suspect I'll forget once we start dyeing Wonderwool wool and concentrating on show preparation.

So sadly yet again the mythical party won't be happening....

Maybe for our 30th, but I kind of doubt it, unless Wonderwool has to re-jig their dates again.

My Mega De-Stash Update

This is a long post, please bear with me I ramble a bit but get to the wool part before the end  :-)

We have had to move house 3 times in the past 3 years and in a few weeks we will be moving for the 4th time, but this time we have a 2 year lease with an option of longer if we want.
At this point in my life I'm really tired of moving and I want to settle.

Those of you who have followed me (us) for a long time you will remember our story and why we have had to move.
We originally lived here in a proper house with a shower and a kitchen and central heating.

Then when we lost the house we lived here under the radar in the derelict pig farm that NDS worked from.

It actually looks quite nice in this photo, but believe me life was very very difficult.

Then we took the plunge and escaped to Exmoor to start a new life and our first home was the Mews. 

The mews was tiny, lovely in the summer, but in the winter it turned into a mouldy hovel.

When our landlord decided to sell we had to move again, we were lucky to be offered a massive flat almost next door and have been very very happy at no 19.

Here's Billy being very happy last winter before we re-tiled the fireplace and us being very happy with our close woolly friends.

And then just before Christmas our landlord told us he was putting our giant flat up for sale and that we had to move again, as you can imagine it made us unhappy to lose our home again . 

But living in a place and being part of the community means you know people, who know people and so we found our new home, which not only has a kitchen and a garden, but it also has a cellar, a shower and one of these.

And a view from my new bedroom window

And better than anything else is the fact I am going to have a Wool room/Studio.

So I have been planning my wool room in my head, its going to have filing shelves for all my pattern work and books and of course boxes and boxes of yarn, but as I have 14 blankets to make for my new book it needs it has to be very specific yarn, not the large and varied stash I have now.

So I made the decision that rather than move all my stash to the new house and fill up space I should be using for something else I would do a massive de-stash update and sell it.

You have to remember that the whole of the NDS stock is my stash, so this is just stock that's been on a long holiday.

I have spent the last 2 days photographing and preparing my stash for Thursday's update, I made a mental decision that everything had to go as long as it hadn't been used and was still in a good condition.

Some of this yarn has been with me on every part of our roller coaster journey, and I am really sad to part with it, but its much better that it finds a new home with you who might make something beautiful rather than stays with me in a box on a shelf for the next 2 years plus.

Here are some of my saddest goodbyes.

This beautiful boy. He is a bright pink (cochineal) Precious 100% silk DK, he got left in the bottom of a dye bath about 4 years ago and has been my treasure ever since.

He is impossible to photograph, but so stunning in real life.

 And the last ever batch of the old Angel 4 Ply/Sock which was discontinued several years ago, I kept the last 500 gms and promised my self I would make something special, but then life got in the way.

And this stunning collection of Godiva DK, the colours look so beautiful together I would keep them just to look at if I didn't have the job where I could dye more any day I wanted.

And the last skein of the first batch of the Lorna Doone that we had spun, I've paired it with the first skein from the new Lorna Doone batch.

And my lovely collection of Dazzling lace, lace just isn't really a blanket yarn!

 And some pure gold Lynmouth Precious 4 ply, so perfect, so precious, but so NOT blanket.

And finally amongst so many others I could chose in my stash is my collection of Madder Dazzle 4 ply/Sock, as you know we are discontinuing Dazzle 4 ply/Sock at the end of this year and its pointless making blankets for a book with yarn that won't be available when the book is published.

My de-stash will be this weeks NDS update, you will be able to find it on The Natural Dye Studio's website HERE at 7 pm (UK time) on Thursday the 20th of March 2014

And you can find all the photo's of my lovely yarn HERE on Flickr.

If you end up re-homing it for me, please love it as much as I do :-)

Book - Blanket no 2, post 1

You might remember I promised to share photo's and stories from my future book as I go along.

As a designer I find it really difficult not to show you everything I do and 2 years is a really long time for me to keep my blankets secret, but I (and my publishers) want this book to be something new and exciting and unseen.
I want to share because I am really excited with what I am doing, sometimes it might seem like the only reason I want to share photo's is for you to tell me how wonderful I am, but thats not the reason.
I share as your reactions help me gauge how good a design is.
If no one comments it normally means you don't like it and I need to re-think what I'm doing, if there are lots of good comments it means I've got it right and I can carry on in the direction I am going.

For example no one loved the Rising Sun, you loved this photo as it tells the story of Daisy finally finding her man and happiness, but you didn't comment or "love" the blanket on its own.
I really loved it and didn't understand why you didn't too, but thats ok as your reaction told me that complex blended colour was the wrong direction, or maybe the photo's were a bit rubbish or maybe you just don't like orange.
You want all the colours of the rainbow in the same place at the same time, which is fine because so do I.

Anyway back to number 2

I've started number 1 and done about 1/4, but while working on my sketch book of designs I became besotted by number 2, I've learnt that when I feel like this I need to go with the flow, so I'm working on number 2 three designing days a week, my fourth designing day is Kaleidoscope day.

Number 2 is going to be big, much bigger than I planned, but thats fine because some of you (including me) have big beds :-)

To start work on number 2 I needed to master crocheting a flat circle, I spent days and days trying to do it, I must of read every flat crochet circle blog post and tutorial on the internet.

I came across several blogs that said once you can do a flat circle you can call yourself a crocheter, quite obviously I wasn't!!

Finally after a frustrating week of wobbles and frogging I managed it, all I needed to do was tweak a couple of numbers, but only after one of the tutorials said the numbers weren't set in stone - DOH stupid me!!

So now I can crochet flat circles I have a lot of crochet time I need to catch up with.

Stupidly I've decided to go back to Instagram, I signed up ages ago and didn't really use it, but have decided I quite like it now and so am planning to photograph tiny pieces of my blanket wips and post them on Instagram.

If you want to follow me I am queenieamanda2 and you can find me HERE

And here is the first photo some of my flat(ish) crochet circles for blanket no2, there is another one of frogging on Instagram, but I can't work out how to save it, and I stupidly deleted it off my phone.

I might take some more over the next few days, but don't expect to see anything that will look like a blanket, let alone a finished blanket.