I'm a winner!

I'm not a big competition enterer (is there such a word? Probably not!) - but when I saw one on Planet Penny's wonderful blog to win a Daylight Lamp  I couldn't resist entering. Penny asked how a Daylight Lamp would make life easier for me - now that wasn't a hard one to answer! Up here, in the northernmost town in mainland UK , the winter nights are long and the days are short. Here's a pic from my kitchen window last winter:

You can see my lovely little studio on the left there. However it does get a tad dark and gloomy during the long winter months, so I really coveted the lamp.

So I entered the competition, then off I went on holiday for two weeks and thought no more about it, because I never win anything. (that could be because I rarely enter anything, but let's not split hairs now...)

So imagine my amazement when I got home to find that I had WON!!! I had a lovely email from Penny and my Swan table lamp was very speedily dispatched and arrived all the way up in the far north in very quick time. I finally got it set up and working and took some pictures this afternoon, I am so thrilled with it!

Here is the lamp in all its glory - not the best pic but I haven't found a home for it yet, so it is just lurking on top of my 1942 Singer sewing machine at present:

It has a fabulous acrylic magnifier which pops on and off the base really easily, and can be positioned wherever you want it. The light is neat and also will move wherever you need it.

And look at the difference in the photos! Without the lamp ...

And with the lamp ...

Whoo hoo!!

(The picture, by the way, is of my binsenkorbchen socks that I am knitting up ... wonderful pattern creating by slipping stitches rather than stranding - really pleased with them so far!)

So a huge thank you to Planet Penny for running the competition, and to the random number generator for picking me as the winner, and to  Daylight Company for their brilliant lamp!

A place to play

Every child needs a place to play .. and so does every adult! Here's my "play space", a fabulous shed in the garden.

I have a lovely old oak table for sewing on, where I keep all my bits and bobs to hand:

On the left is my trusty Singer sewing machine, on the right is my upcycled lampshade that I crocheted with hand-dyed silk. In front of it is a drinks mat made from sea glass I found on the beach.

The stripy thing you can see is my little desk bin, for all those bits of thread and fabric snippings. I had seen something similar on Planet Penny's website and decided to have a go. My knitting needle holder originally had shortbread in it! And old spice jars make great button holders.

I made my "to do" list from a cheap photo frame with wrapping paper in it, and I use a white board pen to add things to it. I made the little birds from air-drying clay and copper wire.

I have a fabulous wee set of drawers that are full of lots of bits and bobs - sewing thread, beads, tape measures and "found" items. On the top I keep my pincushions (I have three but I don't know where the other two are at the moment!), plus some more air-drying clay sculptures (these were created by modelling around small bottles and tinfoil, wrapped up with masking tape before applying the clay).

More buttons, safety eyes and handbag clasps in another old spice jar arrangement. I cheered this one up with red paint and polka dots. I painted the picture but haven't got round to putting it up yet. The yarn is some I hand-dyed myself , in a lovely plate made by a ceramic artist friend of mine. The stones were painted by my eldest daughter.

My bookcase holds all sorts of treasures - my sock monkey stash, my ideas notebooks, and all my sewing and knitting inspiration books. Some are old favourites, some are new additions, all are often referred to. I used to have three times as many but I have pared them down recently. Just at the bottom of the picture you can see my Parker Knoll armchair covered in a Rainbow Granny blanket - for more pictures of it have a look here.

My favourite item in my shed is this picture by a lovely artist friend of mine Charlie Meyer - for more of her work have a look at her regularly updated Facebook page . It never fails to cheer me up!

Anything else you want to know about what you see, just ask! Do you have a place to play too?

More Adventures - this time in yarn dyeing

Wow, what a long time since I last posted! Apologies, life has been a little hectic around here. Crafting still going on (at a slightly reduced rate!) but back to normal after next week.

In the meantime, I finally got round to dyeing my lovely hanks of yarn I got from World of Wool . I got a gift voucher from there for my fortieth birthday last year, and promptly invested in  two hanks of yarn and six wee pots of dye. However I was then too scared to use them! So this week I got together with a friend and she showed me what to do.

Firstly, we dunked the yarn (and some carded fibre to experiment with first) into a bucket filled with malt vinegar. I didn't realise you could use normal brown vinegar, I thought it had to be distilled! So that was my first surprise.

This is Bettine giving my wool and her fibre a good pummelling in the bucket. You can imagine the smell for yourself! It's not really a very social activity!

She showed me some of the yarn she had dyed herself the previous week - aren't the colours wonderful?

Unfortunately I forgot to turn the flash off so some of the colours are reflected in the lustre of the yarn but you can see what wonderful vibrant colours she got! There's a mix of painted and pan-dyed yarns there.

OK - on to our experiments. This one didn't go as expected (actually to be fair, none of them did! But that's half the fun of it!). I used cherry red, crimson and orange, but it all ended up fairly much one colour.

You can see some undyed fleece in the background there. This is the fleece all dyed and ready to go into the microwave (I put it inside a microwaveable bag first to make sure we didn't coat the inside with dye!).

The next thing we did was take the first skein of yarn and pot-dye it in two colours, fuschia and periwinkle. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the dyeing process because my hands were covered at that point! But here is the end result, with the red fleece and another piece of fleece dyed in fuschia and periwinkle, all drying on my washing line (scuse the poor photo, the light was just beginning to fade at this point)

And here's the skein all dried and ready to wind!

A lot more pink than I intended, but I was really pleased with the variation in the colour in the blue.

Naturally I wound it up and started knitting a pair of socks straightaway!

That was yesterday. Today, embolded by my success, I decided to paint my other skein (I had kept it in a bag so it was still damp with vinegar). So I laid out my yarn on bin bags and clingfilm, and started with some turquoise just dripped onto two points of the yarn:

I then took some bright yellow and dribbled that over the yarn. Then I added a wee bit of turquoise to make a lovely green, and splatted that in the spaces. I'm about half way through doing that here.

Now what I didn't anticipate was how much the colours would mix together during the setting process! Here's the yarn just after it came out of the microwave (I did it for three minutes in a 700w microwave, then did it for another minute just to make sure).

I think maybe I hadn't done it for long enough, but I was scared of burning the yarn. I took it out and rinsed it ... and all the colours began to blend! Never mind, I'm very happy with the finished result.

The turquoise is now more of an emerald green - I was aiming to have "dots" of colour when it is knitted up but I think they will in fact be wee lines of bright green - we shall see!

One thing I will say though ... I am hooked!! I can't wait to try this again!!

An alternative use for leftover sock yarn

I love knitting socks. Once you have made your first pair I swear you become hooked. They are a lot simpler to make than it appears at first, you can have so much fun with pattern and colour, and they are so nice to wear.

However, I find I always have lots of sock yarn left over - not enough to knit into another pair of socks, but enough to make me want to do something with it. Lots of sock knitters make sock yarn blankets with their leftovers, but whilst I find them lovely to look at, I like my blankets to be big and heavy, so a blanket didn't really appeal to me.

So, I decided to make a pair of leggings with my leftovers, and I am really pleased with the final results. I like to wear them under a long sweater, or with a skirt over the top, and they are great in our cold Scottish winter weather.

I loosely followed a pattern which I found on Ravelry, called Super Easy Leggings by Phoenix Bess. And she was right, they really were super easy!  They didn't even take as long as I expected to make, about two months in all. I sewed the ends in as I went along to make it a less daunting prospect!

Thank you to my very kind friend Helen who bought me the pattern!