wool » geniwate.com

No wait, it’s a trivet

Homemade Comments Off

Jan 212012

This ‘thing’ is my first ever felt. It’s for my friend’s birthday, so it needed to become something. I decided it could be the thing you put between the table and the hot pot to protect the table.

Apparently, that’s called a trivet.

There are also brevets and privets. A privet is a well-defined object (although some indeterminancy surrounds the term ‘noctious’, which in some quarters, a privet is), but a ‘brevet’ has so many possible meanings you could write a book about them.

Anyway, I love it when you make something and in the process it accidentally expands your vocab.

Oh and … making felt is easy and relaxing. But you need a bit of gear, and carding wool is somewhat *less* fun.

washing the wool

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Aug 152011

its a natural brown

I bought some anonymous (unfortunately, not organic) wool from Ebay. I’m washing it, 5 times, with Woolskin woolwash. Still smells a bit, but I think I’ve got it clean.

a new design

Creative, Homemade Comments Off

Aug 032011

Hot off the needles, this jerkin, made from Manos del Uruguay wool from, (I kid you not), Uruguay. Shame about the ‘fibre miles’, but I just can’t find locally produced commercially spun wool of this lustrous quality.

My design principle is, buy gorgeous wool, and let it speak for itself. OK, so the lacey look might be slightly beyond my knitting skills…

But I think it’s a good principle.

Unfortunately, my camera can’t do justice to a closeup of this gorgeous wool.

I’ll make you one for $50.00 AUS, so long as you want size 0 or size 1!

I’m not jerkin’ you around (bad joke waiting to happen)

unwinding the yarn

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Jul 152011

Today I took possession of some beautiful homespun wool from Uruguay, the brand is Manos del Uruguay. Its a dreadful waste of ‘fibre miles’, but I’m sorry, Australia might have good raw material but we don’t make many great brands of knitting wool from it.
I’m not accustomed to skeins, so I dived right in, excited to see what it would look like, without understanding that I needed to wind the skein into a ball or the skein would get hopelessly messed up. And it did.
So then I started winding the skein into a ball, although one end was attached to a knitting needle.
I started following the wool into the messy mass, seeking to loop it under and around and through itself to wind it into a ball. It was like diving into a slow vortex, or an infinite labyrinth, as the wool looped back and forth, around itself.
But after a while I found that if I was patient and gentle I didn’t have to do much un-knotting and threading. It would just fall into place.

What Is Organic Wool?

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Jul 132011

Australian Organic Wool (who also supply nice processed organic wool, out of Nimbin) answers my questions about what organic wool is meant to be. There exist standards that they need to meet. Mulesing is not part of the standard, that’s something to think about … But my quest to actually purchase a bale of the stuff remains sadly unfulfilled.