Sunday, November 08, 2009

St Abbs Wool Festival #2.

St Abbs....a view of the harbour from up the hill a bit. A very typical looking East Coast harbour of around these parts.



This is a rear view of the memorial to the Eyemouth fishing disaster of 14th October 1881, where 189 men from the small fishing communities of Eyemouth and neighbouring St Abbs and Burnmouth were lost at sea. I couldn't get a clear shot of the front without falling off the cliff, but basically you see the women and chidren standing on the harbour sea wall, hands to their mouths and looking out to sea with horror on their faces. Most moving.



The Wool Festival was great fun. It's not a big hall but it was stuffed to the gunnels with wool, fibre and other wooly things. I went there feeling I had more than enough wool in the stash at present but of course this doesn't mean fibre, does it?



From left to right..

Two 100g braids of superwash Blue Face Leicester colourway "Shepherds Warning", from Spinning a Yarn. Not my usual sort of colour choice but they spoke to me, so I had to buy them really! I'm looking forwards to spinning these up to see what happens with the colours.

Two 100g braids of Peregrine 75% merino, 25% nylon in pinks and what my daughter would call "girl blues". From The Yarn Yard. Basically it had my little Princess's name written all over it, lol.

Two 100g braids of 70% alpaca, 30% BFL, also from The Yarn Yard. Scrumptious and sooooft. It's a while since I spun alpaca even in a blend, so yum.

One 100g braid of a brown/orage/pumpkin sort of colourway. Peregrine from The Yarn Yard again.

And that's all I bought, actually, apart from several cups of tea and a home-made scone. Quite restrained of me but really, 700g of fibre is a lot of spinning!





I did take a wheel of course. Actually I took three, the Louet S10 to loan around, my Mazurka to spin on and the Wind Wheel to show off. But I didn't take the Wind Wheel in after all. Too crowded. I'm not precious about my wheels normally but the Wind Wheel isn't mine and we were in quite a busy corner. Still it was an ideal corner for visibility, given it was by the doorway to the tearoom so I tucked my elbows in and got talking. Anyone who knows me also knows I do love talking about spinning so I was in my element.

I was spinning on my recently mended Kromski Mazurka. Notice the drive whorl is a tad paler? I did a muppet thing one night when I was tired and tried to unscrew it the wrong way and wrecked it. Fortunately Joan and Clive at The Woodland Turnery can deal with this sort of thing in their sleep, so the Mazurka is as good as new.

There were a LOT of people at the festival, old friends, new ones, virtual and never-met-you-before ones. It was great to see you all but if I start looking you all up and doing links I would be here for paragraphs. So I'll just content myself with saying that yes, it's lovely to go and fondle the yarns and buy new fibres, but what I really go to these events for is to see you all and have a good blether, really.





Final picture..The Yarn Yard stall, later in the day. There was a lot more than this when the doors opened, I think!

2 comments:

Rosie said...

I've just had tor ead and re-read to cehck the numbers who died in that disaster: how awful it must have been.

But that wool festival looks so good I fell that I ought to move to Scotland pronto.

Unknown said...

Sorry to miss you there! Would have been nice to catch up :) I bought FAR too much yarn