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

Let the Blogging Commence

After much umming and ahing I've decided to enter into the world of the Blogger.

Part of the reason for this because I am so impressed with the blogs I read through Ravelry and Knitty, and I also felt a bit voyeristic for reading all those blogs and not contributing with my own.

The other reason is that I am on a massive creative drive and wanted to keep some kind of record of my progress.

So then, a bit about where I'm at. I am currently filling my non knitting/spinning time with running around after 3 girls, volunteering lots at the local primary school doing craft based activities and I'm doing a 15 week Art Therapy Course. This is all to fill in a bit of time before I have another career change and re-train as a Primary School Teacher in september.

This is what I'm currently amusing myself with at the moment. I apologise for the quality of the photo's, my resident photographer is at school!!

A bit of spinning. This is some wool tops with coloured thread purchased from Forest Fibres. I bought this as i knew I was going to be busy so I needed some ready to go. I've plyed it with some gold and silver thread for a bit of sparkle. I've given this to my mum so she can knit something lovely for my new neice.

We had some wonderful sunshine on Sat and I was meant to be doing some gardening, but I got a little distracted by some recently dyed wool and a bag of recycled Sari Silk, so I spent the day carding this up instead!

So there goes my first, and hopefully, not my last attempt to blog. I just hope that blogging doesn't take up so much time that I don't have enough time to do the things I want to blog about!!!