I’m away for a couple of days now, but I’ll be back on Monday.

Have a good weekend!

Natalie

TWENTY THREE.

Eeeep.

Anyway, in a mad moment I offered 23% off in the shop for the day and what I thought might be a dozen orders ended up being more than fifty. In anticipation of a dozen I had said that they would all be dyed and shipped this week but I just can’t get fifty done in that space of time. I think about 25 have now “left the building” and the rest have been slotted in the dyeing schedule for Monday.

The most popular yarn is the new merino sock yarn, and far and away the most popular colour is Waverley.

So much so, that although I have the yarn to dye it, I have completely run out of the dyes (it’s a blend of two colours, layered). More has been ordered.

I’m going to London tomorrow to support Gavin in the Great London Swim, a mile long swim in the open water of the Thames. But this evening, I have more parcels to pack so I’ll wish you goodnight, and if you ordered yarn this week, THANK YOU!

Natalie

It’s been split lengthwise and I’m spinning it in two long colour changing singles. The first one is done.
I have discovered over the years that just as some knitters suffer from Second Sock Syndrome, I am afflicted by Second Bobbin Syndrome.

I suspect the only solution to this is to start spinning it Right Now, before something else takes my fancy.

Am I the only one affected by this?

Natalie

The new colours in the shop (yarn too) are here.

Today I am heading off to Glasgow with a box of goodies for The Yarn Cake, which is I think I am correct in saying, Glasgow’s only independent yarn shop – and if it isn’t the only one, it’s certainly the best.

So if you are based in the west and would like to get your hands on YY yarn and fibre in real life, to squish and snuggle, do pay Antje a visit on Queen Margaret Drive, near the Botanical Gardens.

While I was waiting for everything to dry over the weekend I decided to dig out one of my long neglected sewing machines and take a closer look. I found this one in a skip outside a rather exclusive address in the Grange area of Edinburgh around twenty years ago. It was clearly the product of a house clearance, and I did ask the thrower-oot if I could have it (skip-rustling is frowned upon in some circles).

It was locked and had no key so I had no idea of it was an absolute crock or a jewel, but a phone call to a dealer resulted in a key for about £1.50 and I opened the lid with some excitement.

It’s a Frister Rossmann Model E hand crank, and the crank handle is white porcelain. This is a pretty cruddy photo and as you can see it’s been in a cupboard chez YY for a number of years, but isn’t it a beauty?

It runs sweet as a nut. I love that the bobbin cover slider behind the needle is actually worn from use, and under the dust on the left the veneer has worn smooth on the edge of the case with years of fabric gliding over it. It does forward AND reverse (see the up/down knob next to the flywheel).

As far as I can tell from the serial number it’s probably a late nineteen-teen machine which is doubly intriguing as it’s of German manufacture and my understanding is that these machines largely fell from favour after the Great War.

I’ve oiled the wood, and put it away until later in the week when I hope to have time to play.

Apparently those are treadle-holes below the flywheel, so it could be converted to run on a base as well. And there are FEET to experiment with too.

Natalie

It’s a nightmare. I open up the eglu in the morning and they are sitting there, on top of each other (literally) in the nestbox. I shoo them out, they turn round inside ten seconds and march back in. I lift them out of the side hatch and put them down away from the run. They look at me with utter disdain and walk purposefully back to the run and into the eglu.

So this morning we put them on Hourly Obs. Nurses reading this will remember Hourly Obs.

Every hour I went out and removed them from the nestbox, much to their disgust. They simply walked back in.

I devised a new strategy.

Lock the door of the run, when all four hens were in the run/eglu. Tea and Coffee make a beeline for the nest box, preventing the other two from laying there. Lift Tea and Coffee out of the eglu, leaving Beaker and Milk in the run. Put the access hatch back on eglu and leave eglu door open (but run door closed) so Milk and Beaker can get in and lay their eggs. Shut eglu door to prevent Beaker and Milk from going back into the run because my arms are not eight feet long. Give them 20 minutes. Then lift THEM out of the eglu and collect eggs. Keep run shut and force all hens to be outside both run and eglu (because Coffee and Tea just walk back into the run and settle themselves down beside the eglu door rather pathetically waiting for it to open.

I reckon the worst case scenario is that Tea and Coffee will try to be broody under the Gooseberry bush which is probably quite appropriate, under the circumstances.

Any other suggestions for Broody Hen Management are welcome.

Natalie

I’m working through the stash.

This is the black pique cotton fabric. There wasn’t enough to make a T shirt for me, so I made one for Adam. It’s a very basic pattern from this book. Another one from my pattern stash.

I took the chest measurement from a Tshirt which fits, and matched it to a sweatshirt from the book, so the 42 inch size I would have made as a sweatshirt which would have had drop shoulders and loose armhole fit became a 33 inch size in pattern-terms. I used the neck size for the 33 inch pattern but cut the length longer and made the short sleeves the right length for his height.

The straight seams were done with an ordinary stretch straight stitch, which does a two-forward-and-one-back sort of motion, and the rib was sewn onto the body with a narrow zigzag, remembering to half the stitch length I would normally use because the seam tension point is every other stitch.

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The hem is a twin needle hem, very straightforward and I was lucky enough to have a stretch (ballpoint) twin needle in my sewing box.

The T shirt is black, but I have edited the image to Black-and-White because it makes it easier to see the details.

There may be knitting here tomorrow!

Natalie

These are the first project sewn with Pfreda.

The pattern is Simplicity 7655 which has been in my stash for ages and is about as simple as patterns get.

They are also the first thing I have sewn for myself to wear for more than ten years, but it was so good to get back in the groove, as though I had never been away. The first thing to note is that they are really just glorified PJ bottoms. The slightly stiff fabric means they aren’t as drapey as the pattern envelope suggested they might be. I had also forgotten how HUGE Simplicity patterns are. I ended up taking FOUR CENTIMETRES off each side seam which is more than 6 inches all round, and you can see that they are still rather large in the leg.

However, these issues aside, I’m quite pleased with them. I was aiming for a loose fitting pair of comfortable trousers which would be cool in hot weather, but not so thin they are transparent and that’s what I ended up with.

This is my default quick seam, not a zig zag in sight. Once I’ve sorted out the fit, I just press to one side (all the leg seams in this project were pressed to the back) and then stitch about 3-4 mm from the main seam working from the right side. And then trim. TRIM VERY CAREFULLY. It’s really easy to inadvertently nick the main fabric, so I do it just a centimetre at a time. And that’s it. I did the crotch seam the same way and with such a small seam allowance it removes the need for ease notches.

The waist is just elastic, and I will always wear these with a longish T shirt so that’s all that’s needed.

And this is the finished seam and the hem. Very simple and serviceable.

Right. Next project…

Natalie

I am a Pfaff girl at heart, and I pretty much wore out my old Pfaff so I started to cruise the blogosphere to find reviews of more recent Pfaff machines.

I knew what I didn’t want.

No computers.

No LCD displays.

No ability to sew rows of little ducks, or houses or alphabets or elephants.

So when I came across FlossieTeacake’s blog in which she wrote from very much the same position and discovered her dream machine I was exceedingly jealous. She bought her Pfaff new in June 2009, and it is now a discontinued machine.

This was her review. It’s spread over two blogposts.

I decided to hunt further, and, as you do, I browsed ebay.

AND GUESS WHAT?

I found Pfreda!

One owner. Bought to start a soft furnishing business but used to make one curtain and a cushion cover and then put back in the box. I couldn’t believe my luck. The only problem was that she was a Collection Only sale and the seller lived in South London.

But, my friends, the tentacles of the knitting community are strong and within hours a friend had offered to collect her for me and ship her to Edinburgh. And the rest, as they say, is history. I was the only bidder and paid a fair but not inflated price for her.

She has a built-in walking foot which is very nifty.

And this is her repertoire. More than enough for me and my sewing needs.

Here we have (clockwise from the top right) olive 45% cotton, 55% linen, taupe viscose/cotton jersey, red cotton pique (from stash), black cotton pique (stash again) and more 45% cotton, 55% linen in a soft brick colour.

These have all been prewashed, hence the crumples, and are destined to be three t-shirt type tops and two pairs of trousers.

Pictures will follow when I’ve made them. Today is most definitely a sewing day.

Natalie

There is nothing more intriguing and fascinating than a For Sale property which is described as having “Potential”.
What do they mean exactly?

It covers everything from “the house was owned by a family with four goth teenagers and all the bedrooms have black-painted walls” to “the roof blew off in the last storm which will make that loft extension and dormer window fitting so much easier for the new owner”.

A year ago we gave up our Gym Membership and invested in a stationary bike and a treadmill to add to the C2 rowing machine. This has been a good thing, especially in the dark winter period when we really didn’t want to go driving eight miles to the Gym. However, it means that all this sizeable equipment has to have a home, and in the same way as an ice-cream maker or a sewing machine or a set of smart chisels, if it’s not accessible, and accessible easily, it just ain’t gonna get used.

So I am moving out of my current office (double bedroom) and I’m going to exchange spaces with Gavin whose office (single bedroom) is about half the size. He can have all the machinery in his space and I won’t be tempted to hang skeins of yarn strategically on it which is what would surely happen if it came into mine.

Apart from the nuts and bolts of the business, the large boxes of undyed yarn, the skein winder, the dyed yarn, two printers, a large quantity of packaging materials, the books, the files and all the other paraphernalia of The Yarn Yard, I also want to be able to sew in this new space, and not to have to put it away every night because, as we all know, that is the surest way of it ending up staying in the cupboard and not seeing daylight for months. Our house is a 1960′s former United States Air Force quarter and in keeping with US style of the time is an open plan house (which is even more open plan since we knocked down a few walls a number of years ago). There were three bedrooms before we built a fourth. Each of the singles has a fitted wardrobe, the main bedroom has two of them. These are what you might call “robust” fixtures. Fifty years on the heavy, plain, solid wood sliding doors work perfectly well on smooth runners and the original hanging rails are in use.

My new office will have one wardrobe instead of two, so I need to downsize somewhat, and there has been much ferrying of “stuff” to the dump. Normally I would advertise things on Freegle, or Gumtree, or pop a notice in the Post Office. This time, for once, I am just getting rid of stuff. I figure that in a lifetime of recycling pretty much everything which comes into the house, I can be forgiven for a few bin-loads going to landfill.

I’ll have a new (old, ex military) desk, which was actually sourced from the American base up the road when the place was decommissioned – there is a kind of circular appropriateness there somewhere. The new desk is also half the size of my current HUGE table and has a pleasing green linoleum/mock leather top inset into the wood. A good functional piece of furniture. No need to replace it.

But this still leaves me with YY storage issues (which I’ll leave for another post) and the question of where I could sew without needing to tidy it away every night.

And then I got to thinking.

This is one of the current wardrobes. You can just make out at the top a full width and depth cupboard which will be very useful for YY stuff I don’t need all the time. And below, with the sliding doors removed, is the wardrobe. As you can see, the doors are pretty inconvenient because the wardrobe is three rather than four boxes wide and I can never reach the middle ones with the doors in place without playing a painful and contorted version of those little games with sixteen spaces and fifteen tiles which you have to slide about the make a picture. With the exception of the fibre in the second of the larger boxes, and some really pretty quiltlets I want to hang on the walls, all of this is non YY stuff, and most of it is heading for landfill.

But don’t you think it has potential?

The front to back depth not including the door slider space is 62 cm. And it’s 117 cm wide, within the recesses.

So it could easily accommodate a length of 60 cm deep kitchen worktop, built in at desk height.

I’ll need lighting. GOOD lighting. Do I need to wall mount it? Or clip it onto something?

And shelving above the worktop, and maybe some sort of storage below which could be pulled out when I’m sewing, but which could completely fill the under-worktop space the rest of the time?

I found a group on Flickr with some ideas. It’s called Operation: Sewing Room Organization  - take a look and let me know what you think. All ideas welcome. I’m rather looking forward to this project.

Natalie

Reasons…

1. I don’t use it to keep in touch with people.
2. I don’t read it.
3. It bothers me that people make friend requests and then think I am ignoring them.
4. I am on ravelry, on Twitter, I blog, I have email and I can ring friends and they can ring me.
5. Heavens, I can even [pause] go for a cup of tea with them!

I have unfriended everyone (what a ghastly word). I don’t know if you get an email to say I’ve done it. If so, please don’t be offended!

I might use it again in the future, but it’s not something I want to spend time on now and rather like an abandoned blog, or a silent Twitter feed, I think it’s better to deactivate it rather than leave it in limbo.

natalie

PS  I have even unfriended my husband!