Creativity, inspiration and distractions

At our guild meeting in November we were all handed a bag of merino fibre in various colours and told to take it away and create something with it. It could be just spun, felted, knitted, crocheted or what ever we wished to do with it.
I haven't had a very good relationship with pure merino so far, it has tended to run away with me and I haven't enjoyed spinning it at all. In fact the first skein I spun was so dreadful I made art yarn by adding a glitter thread to it.
The intention was to make a femme as my challenge answer.

As we all know plans can be changed and indeed often are.

I didn't want to give in so a few weeks ago I had another go at spinning the stuff. The colours were lilac, a mid green, 2 shades of yellow and 2 shades of blue.

I decided not to plan but to take random clumps of fibre and spin them, no colour scheme in mind. I wanted to go with the flow and I hoped that doing so would appease the powers that be and they would let it magically turn to yarn on my wheel.
Well they did and it did.

I then had to decide what to knit with it and came up with 2 items I've knitted before. One old, one new.
Firstly Calorimetry, I've made quite a few of these and it is an easy fairly quick knit. I made a smallish one as the yarn I spun was a double knit weight. It will fit a teen I would think. It just needs a button for decoration now.


Then, as it is a spinning group, I thought another felted bag for the bits of fluff and vegetable matter would be in order. This bag will hang on the tension knob of the wheel and is perfect for those odds and ends you don't want to incorporate in your yarn.
What do you think?

I've also been knitting my first item this year for the hospice. I wanted to use hand spun and obviously smaller projects will be easier, in the main, although I am not ruling out making larger items for them. No sense being definite about it we all know where that gets us. Loki is never far away when I make promises.
This is my fallow fields Felicity hat, pattern from Ravelry, BFL yarn hand dyed and hand spun by me.
How do you like my new modelling head? It is pot and cost under £4.

Back view of the hat. This photographing under electric light doesn't give the true colours sadly. Hat is very warm and soft.


I liked it so much I made one for me. This is my purple hand spun from a few weeks ago,the fibre is Falkland tops from Mandacrafts.
I decided I wanted a wee bit larger hat for my head and wanted it warm for this icy weather. I added a strand of a very fine commercial mohair to the mix.
It almost feels felted and is very warm.
I'm still in a great deal of pain, the bruising may have faded but the pain certainly hasn't yet. I'm not the most patient of people and this constant pain is a distraction to say the least.
It doesn't help that the weather isn't fit yet for going out. I'm longing for a thaw and some sunshine to enable me to get in to the park at the very least.