It's all happening

Well I can at last let my breath out and start to talk about what I've been involved with for the past 6 weeks or so. It seems much longer than that somehow because so much has been happening.

Some months ago I offered my help to a friend who was considering organising a new fibre festival. I said that if she wanted help on the finance & planning then I'd be only too happy to help out. So she asked me about 6 weeks ago if I was still interested & of course I said 'Yes', anything to do with spinning & knitting & I'm in there. So the ideas began flying back & forth, lots of finding out possible venues, the cost of hiring marquees & portable loos, how much to charge traders, doing plans of floor space. But there was one problem, finding a venue. One of the other people interested, Emma had found a possible site in Surrey, but they wouldn't communicate with Jan, so that was no good. Then she went to an open day/craft day at a farm in Thurleigh, Bedfordshire & thought the farm would be an ideal place. She talked to them & they said they were up for it! We went to visit them & they showed us round the possible fields that we could use & we went away with a venue & lots of ideas buzzing in our heads.

Now we really had to find out very seriously about hiring stuff, and found a few local companies who look as though they will be OK. Jan's in the process of designing a website so that we can go live at the end of September, but she's already getting people wanting trading stalls & that's before we've done any real advertising. It has been circulated to the local Guild of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers, but only just gone out on the huge internet forum of Ravelry, so hopefully people will be starting to generate interest very soon.

Although it's only in the very early stages, we want to work really hard to have a festival here in the East/South/Midlands, so many hours of slog will have to go into getting it just right so that people can have an enjoyable weekend.

Did I tell you the date? It's 23rd & 24th July 2011. The venue will be Scald End Farm, Thurleigh, Bedfordshire.

I look forward to seeing you there.

This is getting addictive

I didn't think when I started this that I would get into the habit of blogging every day, perhaps it's the novelty which will stop very soon who knows?

Well Dave & Sam Cam are now in Downing Street & much as I disliked Gordon Brown as PM I really felt for him when he gave his resignation speech. I do wish him well whatever he does do in the future, whether it's charity work if he resigns his seat or if he stays in Parliament, which must be a very bitter pill to swallow, sitting on the Backbenches when you've commanded so much power.

Last night was a disaster one way or another, cold food & nothing like I ordered, soup that was like salty dishwater & the waitress said that it was hot & promptly spilt it down me! Luckily it wasn't that hot & my jacket is washable but the final straw was the most tasteless dessert I've ever had in my life. They brought me fruit salad instead which was OK. The only redeeming feature was that the company was good. Unfortunately we heard that a friend had just died that afternoon, so it really was the final upset of the evening.

Still on to happier things. Today, it was school knitting club. Still quite a few interested kids & some of the year 2's are getting along really well. I had my niece & another young girl, but if I cast on once for the other girl I must have cast on ten times, she just couldn't get it & kept pulling the stitches off the needles. Then she told me that she could knit better with one needle, when I asked her what she meant she tried to show me a looped cast on which the family worker had shown her last week, which she still didn't know how to do. It's a quick way of casting on but isn't really that good for a beginner as it stretches too much & doesn't form a good base, but I suppose that she might get it eventually. My niece, or great niece really, managed to get a few stitches knitted, so hopefully she'll make some progress next week.

I'm going to try getting some of the Texel fleece washed so that I can get it ready for the natural dyeing workshop with Jenny Dean on Saturday, also I'd better get 50gms of yarn ready to dye