Worldwide spin in public day (19th Sept 2020)

Well its been a very different sort of summer. No Festival of Culture or Bikefest to spin at. Online spinning along can only go so far, so while we still have sunshine I decided to go and spin outdoors and in front of an audience for this year's Worldwide Spin in Public Day. Outdoors = next-door's garden and with an audience of one. But it felt nice to be answering questions about my craft again. I think others in my guild planned to do some garden spinning themselves and hope that happened - it was lovely weather for it. Take care everyone and hope to spin in public again sometime soon(ish).

BRITSPIN - the event that carried on through COVID

BRITSPIN is billed as the UK Spinning Marathon. 2020 was its third year and it was not going to let a 'little thing' like COVID19 get in the way of spinners challenging themselves. Unlike other events that 'went online' this year, this event (for most participants) has always been online, primarily on the knitting/crochet/spinning/weaving platform Ravelry ). Most Britspin teams do not meet up and some may not even be spinning on the same continent. The motivation is for spinners to challenge themselves (there are a variety of ways we can do this). They also raise money for charity (this year's charity was the RNLI) and dedicate days at a time to spinning and having fun. Some teams are more serious about this than others. This year the 'local' team set the bar exceedingly high. Krys (who was a member of the Stratford upon Avon guild's Over The Rainbow BRITSPIN team) suggested a very special mascot. Barney belongs to a friend and was rescued by the RNL...

Sheep, spinning, suits and Savile Row

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...

Machine knitting - watch out for the steel eye spun brigade!

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...

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