I was instructed to bake a cake for the weekend. Oh but its two days, so we’ll need one for Sunday too. The third one is for the goat herd, without whom we wouldn’t be able to go

Extreme old age finally caught up with poor Sasha

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I have a poor sense of smell.  Actually, “poor” is the wrong word.  “Silly” is better. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning was lovely & sunny, so we set about giving the Little Goat her six-monthly clip.  We were determined that it wouldn’t take as long as last time which was four hours of wriggling & squirming and she had developed a new habit of wincing at every snip.  She was quite happy but we were exhausted bags of nerves by the end of it!

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The poor old Timber Top has been alternating between Broken and Mended as often as The Drum in the Discworld books this summer.  However, I’m delighted to announce that It Is Now Mended.   Its new tensioner handle arrived very swiftly from James this week and Graham installed it with a gentle thwump of the mallet.  So, finally, I plied my Cringoch Blue-faced Leicester:

It turned out not quite as fine as I hoped – 21wpi (I’d been aiming for nearer 25), but it’s still a nice weight for a shawl and exactly 100g (I think that’s a first!).  There’s over half a kilometer of it!  As usual, when it’s important to get it right, the camera was sulking about doing colours nicely for me.  It’s actually somewhere between what these pictures show and totally beautiful.  Fantastic dyeing work by Artis-Anne!

Meanwhile, on the other wheel, I finished this:

Jan dyes for me strips of Blue-faced Leicester in different colours which I then blend.  I’m rather pleased with how this one has turned out, which will be for baby socks for the shop.

It’s been another miserable day today, but, for a little while this evening, a watery sunshine broke through, so the goats came to outside the conservatory where they could take full advantage of it and hung round, chewing.  They have an amazing ability to turn any lovely, unspoiled patch of countryside into a street corner.  Then the Goat! dozed off on the window-sill:

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Yes!  At noon today, there was a bat milling around above the pond, hunting insects.  I suppose the weather’s been so dreadful that they haven’t been able to hunt at night and are very hungry.  He was far too fast for me to get a photo, but judging by the enormity of his ears, I suspect he was a Long-Eared Bat!

Well, actually, it’s the wool I’d forgotten to take a picture of in August.  The Fine Wool fibre was from Freyalyn, “Shallows” at the top and “California” below.  Both at 14wpi, they were the first test of thicker yarn plied using my new flyer on my Timber Top wheel. Read the rest of this entry »

Will it hatch into a goat kid?  Probably not. I suspect its destiny is to be a beautiful shawl, which will be a lot less noisy on the whole.  This was made on a lovely Thursday afternoon when Amber & Mr Mog came to visit.

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