Felting and more

The weekend before last, I did the picture felting workshop with Helen Melvin at De Spinners. In total there were 4 workshops going on that weekend. Saturday evening we ate Japanese together, it was a really nice meal. I had never eaten Japanese.
For the felting workshop we were given a bag full of natural died wool and yarns + a photo. The wool and yarn colours were taken from the photo. First we felted a small piece of felt. Next we felted the bigger piece in the colours of the photo. Best was to take just a small part of the photo as inspiration for the felting. This was all wet felting, the next day we were going to use the sewing machine to get it all together. The small piece we made was to get used to using the sewing machine for this. I managed to do some but the thread kept braking so in the end I gave up and used the embellisher machine to get the bigger felted piece together. I'm still hoping to use my sewing machine to give the finishing touch to it all but I had great fun using the embellisher. I had not used one myself before.

My Magic Dobby is still not working. I phoned with Louet and they were very helpful and I tried out what they advised but still no luck so I will phone Louet again this week and hope to get to the bottom of the problem. I cannot get my computer to talk to the interface. I really miss my computer goeroe next to me.

The warp is rewound and ready for weaving. Problem was the Louet raddle being to narrow with the half centimetre division for the mohair yarn and in the end I used my own raddle (made by my father years ago when  he could still see) and that worked fine for this type of yarn.

I'm planning to weave a network draft taken from Thrilling Twills from Fiberworks, I've had to delete some threads from the design as my warp did not have enough threads to weave the original. But I'm happy with it.

I had some distraction this weekend as my granddaughter came to stay with me unexpectedly. Today we went to the seaside as she had not been before. Still to cold to bath but we have been looking at shells and had great fun together. Tomorrow she is going back home again.

She is not yet 4 and she really enjoyed herself in the sun. Is it not lovely to be young? Her older brother will come at Easter and I'll take him also to the seaside as he too has not been before and he loves shells and stones.