Autumn felties & mittlets

Felty brooches

Just thought I'd mention that the felt I use is not actually handmade, but it is 50 percent wool. (The acrylic fibre gives the felties extra strength – Eve's Rammy brooch has been accidentally put through the wash three times, and he still looks amazing.) I've also been using alpaca fleece to fill them, which makes them extra soft.

Here are some of the latest incarnations.

Buzz

Bluebirdy

Chimpy

Bunny

Cocky

Escargot

Jelly

Owly

Ladybird

Periwinkle

Ozzie Bear

Pouchy

Turty

Snoop

Wolfy

Mittlets

These are like fingerless mittens, with one hole for the thumb. You can still do lots of stuff with your hands, and they are soft and warm. Because they are made of natural fibres, they need to be washed by hand.

To make them, I first spin my own yarn. I prefer merino, alpaca and sometimes silk or bamboo.

I hand-card the alpaca, which takes a couple of hours for about 100g.

Carders loaded with fleece ready for brushing (carding)

Then I spin it, usually plying it with merino (I don't have any pics of spinning!). It takes about four or five hours for 100g skein.

The next step is to hand-dye the yarn. That takes about an hour (30 minutes in the pot and another half an hour preparation and clean-up).

Here's my latest alpaca/merino skeins ready to be knitted up:

And some of the latest mittlets I've made:

I've also experimented with spinning some bamboo, and it makes an incredibly soft yarn.
Here I've plied it with merino:

Are you asleep yet?

Fixing Stuff

Re-caning a chair

Back in March 2011, I found a beautiful handmade chair with a knackered cane seat, and thought I'd try to fix it. I figured re-caning couldn't be that hard.

I bought a repair kit from V.I. Reed & Cane in the US and surfed the internet to find a good instruction video. But I was buggered if I could find one, so I took a stack of photos and did sketches to try to work out how to do it myself.

 

 I soaked the cane and began pegging it out...

But it was so much harder than I thought. I had to rethread the cane several times as I'd either threaded the cane in the wrong holes, or I'd completed the layers in the wrong order.

TWO WEEKS later...

It ended up being a pretty wonky version of the original, but it looks okay from a distance I guess.