Christmas Markets

I've got 2 more markets to go before Christmas, Middlesbrough's 2 day Christmas market starting on Friday 30th November, followed by Stockton Sparkles on the 6th December, which lasts for 4 days.

These are 2 of the 10 yarn bowls that I picked up from my potter this week so that I, hopefully, have enough to see me through these 2 markets, I've also got French knitting kits, Drop Spindle kits as well as a Beanie hat, 2 scarfs, sock and a soft toy knitting kits to sell, along with all my hand dyed wool.
Then once these markets are over I can then start and think about Christmas.

Changing our name

Now that we have sold our smallholding and are settling into our new home, we have decided that now is the time to change our business name from Willo Alpacas, to Willo Fibres, to better reflects what we do now, and to be honest over the bast couple of years, I've heard people say that all my dyed wool and fibre is all from Alpacas, which it's not. So hopefully with the new name people will better understand what we sell.

The last of the lambs

This afternoon we took the last of our 3 lambs that were grazing at our friend's smallholding to the Abattoir.
We thought we were going to a right battle to get them not only into the trailer, but into a holding area to "dagg" them out. Thankfully when we arrived, my friend had been able to get the boys into a smaller paddock next to the stables. Originally they have been in a 5 acre field, which to get to you had to cross another 5 acre field and a bridge across a stream! and as anyone who has sheep knows, moving a large flock of sheep is so much easier that trying to move just one or 2, even if they are bucket trained!!
Once into the holding area we were able to clean them up, (and I'll let you guess who had the job of holding onto the lamb and who was doing the "dagging out"!) and then man handle them into the sheep trailer.
The abattoir is only 5 miles away and they have an arrangement where you can take your sheep on Sunday afternoon rather than have to rush on the Monday morning, and when we arrived, the owner was waiting to book our lambs in and get them settled into a pen, next to other pens of lambs.
I've cleaned the freezer out so all I have to do now is wait for a call from the abattoir to go and pick up the meat. So it looks like we will be having lamb at Christmas.

Snow, Dyeing and Spinning

On Friday night we had our first flurry of snow, and it's not even the end of October. So the dog walk on Saturday morning was a cold and wet one, the snow had gone, but there was sleet in the rain. We were supposed to go to the North Yorkshire Smallholder's AGM but even though there was no snow here, we knew that some of the roads over the moors would have laying snow and overnight some of them had been closed due to the snow, so  we decided to stay at home.
Tim remodelled the inside of our fitted bedroom wardrobes, I dyed up 2kgs of Blue Faced Leicester/silk sock weight knitting wool. I'm trying out some new dyes, where you just sprinkle the dye powder onto the wool then gently push the wool into the water, making the dye spread into the wool. You can get some very interesting colour combinations with this method of dyeing, but you have to be careful that the dye goes right through the full skein of wool. Something I'm finding is taking a bit of practise, but so far the effects are quite spectacular.
Whilst waiting for the dyed wool to "cook" in the oven, and for the rest of the afternoon, I got on with spinning some of the Corriedale fleece that I've had made into rovings by my friends of Norweft. It was also a good excuse for me to test out the new Woolie Winder on my Schacht Spinning Wheel. The Woolie Winder works exactly as I expected and enables me to produce very evenly filled bobbins of over a 100gms of fibre, which, when plyed will produce large skeins of wool for a special project I have in mind,

We now have safe electrics...

We now have a lovely new fuse box in the under stairs cupboard. Every room has plaster chiseled out where the new wiring has gone in. Some of the old wiring gave our electrician one or two shocks, quite literally at times! and we have taken the opportunity to add extra electric points to various rooms, sort out the way the lighting works in the kitchen and hall. Gone are the days of having to walk through a dark kitchen to turn on/off the kitchen light, or going down stairs and walking down a dark hall to turn the hall light on/off.
The electrician discovered that all the house and outside sheds were all on one circuit, the attic rooms were not on a ring main and quite a bit of the house wiring was just flex!!!!
Whilst all this work was being done, there was not a great deal I could do, so I spent most of the time in the lounge, with the dogs, and my new spinning wheel, giving me the ideal opportunity to give my new wheel a good try out.
Now we can start to think about decorating

Site of some destruction!

Over the past week the electricians have been here rewiring the house, and in some ways not a moment too soon. The whole of the house and the sheds were all on one circuit, which is not good and the attic rooms were not even on a ring main!!!! So we have spent most of the week with carpets and floor boards up, holes have been chiseled into the walls where new wiring has been chased in and on Friday the electrician, Andy, was changing his name to Harry Potter, as he spent most of the day in the under stairs cupboard fitting a new fuse box and attaching all the new wires. Hopefully they will be finished early next week, and then we can start and decorate!
Yesterday was another day of destruction, but this time of a different type, destruction of the garden. Our friends the Hedge laying Hollands were here to help us to remove 4 large specimen conifers and five smaller ones planted around the base of one of the magnolias and finally an overgrown clematis planted near the back door and trained over an arch onto the roof of the utility room. Now it has gone, it's amazing how much more light there now is in the utility room.

 This is the pile of debris from the cut down conifers

 Where the conifers once stood, we now have room for a new shed

Now the conifers have gone from underneath this magnolia, we can now see it in it's full glory as a specimen tree in our garden.

What I didn't photograph, and you can't see it behind the magnolia, is that I've made a big dent in removing the flowers from the boarder that is going to be my veg garden. I won't get anything planted this autumn, but I'm hopeful for the spring.





Stokesly & Saltburn

Yesterday we were at Stokesly Agricultural show, in the Craft Tent, this is the first time we have done this show, we've attended as a visitor for many years, but his year decided to have a table in the Craft Tent. I took along my spinning wheel, as requested, and when we found our table in the marquee I was surprised at how small the table was, 6' x 2' and no room at the side of the table to set my spinning wheel up. So I put out my hand dyed wool and pot yarn holders on the table and set my wheel up, behind the table and started to spin. I'd packed 200gms of alpaca to spin, thinking that would last me all day. But it didn't, but mid afternoon it was all spun and plyed. Tim kept having a wonder around, as did I, and in fairness we did have some good sales, enough that we will book another table next year.
Halfway through the day we were joined by our friends Freylyn and Mark, plus their dogs Lunil and Bil. Whilst Tim, Mark and dogs went off round the show, Freylyn stayed with me in the Craft tent, with her spinning wheel. She did comment that whilst we were spinning she felt like a goldfish, with so much interest in what we were doing, but wouldn't mind doing the same again at next year's event. At 4.30 we packed up and headed off for home and a much needed glass of wine and an Indian takeaway.
Today, after the customary breakfast of Tim's special sausages, tomatoes, bacon, eggs, mushrooms and toast, a quick walk through Fairy Dell, then off to Saltburn for the dogs to have a good run on the beech, but also to see the gorilla knitting on Saltburn pier.
Here are some to the photos I took of the knitting:-

 But it would appear that the image of Prince Harry has been removed.
After a bracing walk along the beech, with the dogs running and playing, followed by a much needed cup of hot chocolate (coffee for Mark and Tim), we took the trip back up to the top of the cliffs on the funicular railway, and then a walk along the main street looking at the many different shops, back to the cars, and then home.
We will hopefully see Freylyn, Mark, Lunil and Bil at Masham next weekend.