Going on a Yarn Hunt

Well, here I am again and so much for not buying any more yarn until Fibre East!  In my defence, however, I discovered that I had booked myself on a family history seminar on 6 May, which here in the UK is Love Your Local Yarn Shop Day.  This counts as a party day at my local yarn shop - customers bring along food and drink and Eleanor buys in new yarn to tempt us with.  So, as I was going to miss the party and the new yarn, I decided I needed another opportunity to buy yarn.  And lo and behold, the indie dyer with whose yarn I am currently knitting a Hitchhiker shawl announced on Facebook that she was going to be at the Tideswell Food Festival.

Tideswell is a village in the Peak District of Derbyshire, the neighbouring county to mine.  It is about 1 hour 20 minutes drive away, so not too far for a jaunt.  So on Saturday last, I came out of my chiropodist appointment, went and put petrol in the car and drove off to Tideswell.  It was a nice enough drive and when I got there, there was free parking in a field just outside the village.  The only drawback to that became obvious when I opened the car door and found a relatively fresh deposit of sheep dung just where I was about to get out.

Once I had negotiated my way out of the field around the various deposits, it was a gentle walk along the road into the village.  The Food Festival appeared to be very popular as the parking field was just about full and the streets were full of people, often families, wandering between stalls.  The houses tend to be stone built and the deeper you go into the village, the closer they are to the road.  The stalls displayed all sorts of food from cheese to crepes to Thai to burgers to chicken tikka to olives to fresh bread and so on and so forth.

However my main interest was in the church.  Advertised as Craft in the Chancel, there were four stalls in the chancel of the church just before the altar rail selling jewellery, felted cushions, prints and yarn.  And this is what I bought:

This is Peak District Yarns - she can also be found on Facebook.  The colours of the skeins are actually brighter than this, and her prices are very reasonable for hand dyed yarn.

So what did I buy?  The two skeins on the left are her 4ply high twist 80/20 merino/nylon.  The greeny-bluey one is called Damflask, which is the name of a reservoir in the Peak District, and the purpley one is called Win Hill Witches, a reference to a hill also in the Peak District.

The next skein is her 4ply high twist 80/20 merino silk in the Siobhan's Silk colourway.  It is based on a photograph taken by the dyer's friend, Siobhan.  The last skein is in her 4ply 50/50 silk/merino base in the Silver Surfers colourway.

Next question - what am I going to do with them?  Well, the first two will probably become socks, lovely vibrant hand knit socks.  The third one is going to become an Ebb and Flow scarf, a drop stitch pattern from Peak District Yarns which I got free for buying three skeins of her yarn.  And the last one?  I haven't decided yet - it is so nice and squishy that I might just keep it to squish for the time being.

And if that was not enough yarn, what about this?

One of my colleagues has been away on holiday in South Africa for two weeks.  He came back in the office yesterday and presented me with yarn!  What you see there is 62g of natural hand spun South African yarn.  I have no idea what weight it is or how long it is.  Apparently there should have been a label, but it has become unattached.  The rest of the team got sweeties and I got yarn!!!  Guess who is currently my favourite colleague?  I have no plans for it at the moment - just so happy that someone really gets me!

In other news, I got weighed a day early last week and lost 0.5lb.  This was a tad disappointing because if I had lost a whole 1lb, then I would have got my half stone award.  I had to weigh-in early because we were going out for a team meal on my normal weigh-in night.  We went to a posh burger place but I managed fairly well.  I had a vegetarian burger (red kidney beans and beetroot) without the bun and I had the side salad instead of fries.

Tomorrow is weigh-in night and also I need to make the time to vote in the local elections.  This is for our borough council, which deals with council tax, planning, rubbish etc.  Then we have the build-up to the General Election which has been sprung on us.  I won't get onto politics as it will probably give me indigestion.

I think that I will leave this here for now.  My next post really ought to be about what I am currently knitting, just as a change from the projects that I finished while I was not posting.

All the best to you and yours, and I will be back soon.