John Arbon Textiles Mill Open Weekend

My freinds (and neighbours) John and Juliet are having a open weekend at their mill in South Molton next weekend.

There will be lots of lovely socks, yarn and fibre for sale, some of it on sale and tea and cakes and plus mill tours with the lovely John as the tour guide.
Daisy and I will be there at some time over the weekend, and at some point over the weekend its very possible we will be helping to sell yarn, that is if I can stop buying it all for myself long enough to sell it:-)

You can find all the details HERE on their website

Not a proper blog post this week

Sorry we've been so busy cleaning and decorating the dye room before we hand back the keys I haven't had much time to work on a proper blog post.
But I have added a couple of new pages, they both need lots more work, but both of them are a start.

I've added Choosing Colour
And Lynton Links

Hopefully lots more later :-)

Zodiac & swatching

A very short Instagram round up this week as I've already told you about Love Crochet and added the new Lynton Crochet Stroll page.

Last week was all about organising my new work schedule, working on the Zodiac and swatching new yarns.

I had planned to have the Zodiac club blankets finished by the spring, but as we are almost in May I am playing catch up, I've finished the may instalments for both blankets and are now working on June, I've joined the knitted motifs and hopefully will finish the crochet version this afternoon.
Phil has finished knitting the July motifs and is working on August, so I've almost caught him up :-)
Although by the time I finish July he will have finished knitting August and I will still be a month behind him.
But it won't take me long to catch up with him and then we will both only have 4 months left to knit/crochet, I've given us a deadline of finishing both blankets by August.
Below are some wip photo's which I've taken and posted to prove that I am still making blankets :-)

I've just realised if you don't know anything about the Zodiac blanket clubs you might be very confused :-)
The Zodiac mystery blanket club, runs throughout the whole of 2015, there are 2 versions, the knitted one knitted by my lovely husband Phil and a crochet version made by me.
At the end of the year members will have a knitted or crochet blanket, the design is based on the Zodiac and contains all 12 star sign constellations in roughly the right order revolving around the sun in the centre of the blanket.
I am planning a Zodiac page for the blog, but its still on my to do list along with several other pages.....maybe this week....

        

 

     

I've also been swatching my huge pile of sample yarns from Love Crochet

I need to remove and replace the recommended NDS yarns for my entire back catalogue of patterns, Love Crochet are supporting me by sending me samples to test as potential replacements.

As soon as I've finished I will be adding some yarn reviews on yet another new page :-)

    

We had a very busy weekend, we spent the whole of Saturday cleaning, de-constructing and decorating the dye studio. The top two photo's are of what its looked like full of yarn and the bottom is what it looked like after we had almost finished cleaning, de-constructing and decorating.

Next weekend we will tackle the dye room which is a much bigger job :-(

      

And yesterday was the first time in about 9 years we celebrated our wedding anniversary. 

We've always been at Wonderwool selling yarn but as NDS is sleeping at the moment we could finally enjoy the day without working.

We did celebrate our 25th anniversary four years ago, but it was a disastrous series of events, that ended up with Phil eating frozen pizza while I lay semi concious on the sofa recovering from food poisoning.

Next year is our 30th wedding anniversary, I really hope we can celebrate in style with all our family and friends, maybe even have a party.....

Love Crochet

A couple of weeks ago I had an e-mail from LOVE CROCHET asking if I would like to work on some projects with them.
Of course I said "YES PLEASE", its an amazing opportunity for me to be able to work with them on some of the ideas I had planned for the future, plus I have the chance to test and review lots of new yarns and choose which ones to recommend for my designs, its rather like being given the keys to the sweet shop :-)
At the moment the joint projects are in the development stage, so I can't tell you what they are yet, but I can tell you I'm really excited and can't wait to start.

Love Crochet is the sister shop to Love Knitting and was launched at the end of last year, its still early days for them and they have lots of interesting ideas planned for the future.
But even though its early their shop is jam packed full of lots and lots of lovely yarn in all weights and fibres.

Even before I was invited to work with Love Crochet I had started going through their site writing a giant shopping list.
I had chosen Love Crochet as my "go to" shop because of their involvement with Ravelry and their support of Independent designers throughout the whole digital vat mess crisis at the end of last year.
Their sister company Love Knitting took on the digital vat burden to help out Ravelry at a time when no one else seemed to care.
Ravelry channelled all the European digital pattern sales through Love Knitting which enabled indie designers to carry on designing and not have to stop designing because the new law was so difficult to comply with.
I think Love Crochet/Knitting were surprised to discover the wealth of talent of the indie designers and have continued to work with and promote them (and me :-)

So back to the yarn...
This week I received 2 packages full of exciting new yarns to test - or rather new to me :-)
I've got a huge pile to work through, I want to test/swatch each one individually and then test/swatch them alongside NDS yarn to work out which yarn needs to be recommended for each pattern.
Its going to take a while, but I will make a new yarn review/recommendations page so you can find out what I discover.

So for the meantime here are some lovely photos of yarn :-)