To Rip or Not to Rip?

Ok so what do you do when you invest a fair amount of time into something only to fall out of love with it (and no I'm not talking about children!)..............

I started knitting a Beret from a Debbie Bliss pattern book out of some lovely handspum alpaca but it went it a bit wrong, I kept losing count and my cables were wandering. It has now got to a point where I'll have to get a calculator out to figure out where I am....... I've really fallen out of love with.

So do I rip it all out and start again, or do I frog it and end up with something I'm not that pleased with. I would hate to waste a lovely yarn.

Here's the progress so far....



So I've put it to one side while I try to decide, but I would welcome some opinions.

In the meantime I've been distracting myself with spinning and I feel like I've matured a bit! When I first started spinning I plied everything as my yarn was so lumpy and bumpy that it would just snap in places, but now my singles are pretty good, fairly smooth and even so my mum has encouraged me to leave it as singles.





This lot will become a dress for my neice. It also means it takes half the time to produce knittable yarn (I'll have to check with the family whether thats a good thing or not as they have to navigate skeins of wool hanging off every available hook or frame)

I've also been getting into colour again so whilst still working through the sacks of alpaca I blended the black with some recycled sari silk to look like this...............


Come back for on an update on how that spins up.

Now I must do some work to catch up on the stuff I should have been doing when I was playing with fluff.

TTFN x

The Harvest Loaf.

Today I spent the morning in The Youngest's class making our schools Harvest Loaf.


Back in the day when we didn't have supermarkets and bread didn't come in plastic bags it was made by The Baker, and every year at Harvest time Bakers far and wide would compete to make the biggest, and most impressive loaf, to show who was the best.

I love this activity. Its one of those wonderful things that looks complicated but in actual fact, is rather simple.

Our loaf was made from 5lbs of dough. We had a base shape which we then added thin strips for stalks and ears of wheat made from a little sausage shape snipped with scissors. It was finished with a plaited band and a Harvest mouse. We had enough dough left over for the children to make their own loaf. To finish coat everything in a couple of layers of beaten egg.

Go on have a go............although you will need an industrial cleaner if you do it with 22
5 and 6 yr olds!