Rugby School holds an annual Festival in the Close, which tends to coincide with another Rugby town events that the spinners have taken part in in the past - Rugby Festival of Culture. Sadly we cannot take part in RFOC this year (its cancelled but we hope will be back in 2022). However, via the Rugby Artists and Makers Network I learned that Rugby School would run its festival this year, albeit in scaled-back, internal-to-school mode. I was very drawn to the idea of demonstrating with a talk and demonstration alongside another RA&M network member - Savile Row trained bespoke suitmaker Nicholas Hammond. https://nicholas-simon.co.uk Drum carding a batt based on the colours in apple and blackberry crumble, with spiral spun yarn made from this There will be two demonstrations on the afternoon of 30th June at the school. We really hope to provide something interesting to see and some things that Rugby students won't have tried before. So six local spinne
If you - as we have - spent the past year generating handspun yarn, turning stash into squishy skeins and experimenting with dyepots, you may well have quite a lot of transformed yarn to use up. For those (like me) who are slow knitters, turning this into finished items is not the quickest thing. I have handnit three sweaters during lockdown but one of these was knit much faster than either of the others. It was (gulp) machine knitted. On a vintage (1980s) flatbed knitting machine. Before lockdown I had dabbled in ownership and use of various antique and modern circular knitting machines, but now I have moved out one of my looms and in its place I have a small stack of knitting machines. Several of which still require some hard work before they can knit again. Why so many? Because I am trying them out to see what will work with handspun. Also because I have been persuading some of my spin spun sisters that they too need a knitting machine in their lives. Enter Clare, Jo, Liz and Abby
