Working Through the Stash

Hello everyone, it’s been a while since I put out a blog post. Over the past few months I have been steadily working through my wool stash and as usual I am working on several projects at once that are all at various stages of completion. I will be doing a full write up on each project when it is complete, but I thought I would share some progress pictures to give a more ‘real time’ insight into how a project comes together.

Ryeland

I still had a lot of Ryeland wool after knitting the gloves and cowl and wanted to turn this into a jumper. Although I do enjoy knitting, I’m not a very fast knitter and don’t have much patience when it comes to large projects, so I decided to weave it instead with the intention of using a basic jumper pattern from my Saori weaving book. I still have another length of fabric to weave before I can sew it together, but I was very happy with how the fabric turned out – it is incredibly soft and has a very natural look.

Romney

Last year I washed the Romney wool I purchased from Fibre East before storing it until I had the time to prep it. I have now begun the process of carding and spinning it (I will publish a proper fibre prep post soon). All my carding is done using hand carders which is slow (but quite relaxing) work and rather than carding a whole fleece in one go, I work by carding a bagful of rolags and then spinning them before returning to carding again.

Woven Cushion Cover

Back in October 2020 I shared photos of a sample of weaving I had made with the intent of turning it into a cushion cover, but I never took the time to sew it up. I have challenged myself this year to finish off any UFO’s (unfinished objects), so I wrangled it under the sewing machine and fashioned it into a cushion cover. It is constructed by folding the fabric twice right sides together and sewing along the selvedge’s leaving enough space at the opening fold to insert the cushion. I used a straight stitch with a short stitch length as I sew on a vintage hand crank machine (I don’t like electric machines) and the seams are very secure. I had intended to cut off and hem the braided ends, as it was just the way I had kept the warp ends from tangling during washing, but I decided they looked quite nice, so left them be.

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That concludes my little project update post – I am also working on calculating a warp length for my Dorset Horn wool and am of course writing up more blog posts (coming soon!). Let me know in the comments if you have any UFO’s – I definitely do!

Happy Crafting!