A new year, and a new start

We held our AGM yesterday, and voted to have our evening meetings once a month in our new home in Abergele.  We will be having a regular full day meeting once a month in our old home in LlanfairTH. as well, so are looking forward to a stable and busy future.
We were delighted to welcome four new members - this must be a record for a single meeting!  Three are complete beginners, which is wonderful, and a sign of the interest in handcrafts nowadays.
Here we and they are, hard at work in our new venue:

Spinning wheel in action

- and spinners in action

The essential component of any meeting (apart from the people and the spinning wheels).

AC

A new venue?

After much searching, we have found a new venue..... back in Abergele as befits our title.  It wasn't easy to find the ideal combination of room size, access, carpark (essential with all that stuff we carry around) and suitable dates.  Despite A Politician's remarks about a broken society, there are an awful lot of community groups around in this part of the country, all busy meeting and doing, and a lot of them do it on our traditional meeting day! 
In the past we met on a Wednesday:  one evening a week, and all the other Wednesday afternoons. Since the Guild was founded in 1985 we have used a variety of meeting places from schools to community halls, not forgetting the hairdressers' training salon at Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan and that Church hall with the hole in the roof! 
In a break with the aforesaid tradition, we will be now be meeting on the fourth Monday evening of each month (unless there are major unforeseen hindrances).  Our new venue is the Hall beside Capel Mynydd Seion in Abergele, on Chapel Street.  I will publish a new link, with a map, shortly. 
Our first meeting is our AGM, so strictly speaking not "public".  However, I hope that we might offer a taster session to potential new members in the second half of the evening.
In the meantime, we are trying to reconstitute our "Summer Tour".  This was a fixture during school holidays, when members invited each other into their homes on Wednesday afternoons.  When we moved our meetings to LlanfairTH we were able to use the Community Centre all year round and so the Summer Tour went into abeyance.  I am very grateful to those members who have volunteered to offer hospitality, particularly as my own house is too small for me to reciprocate!  As the Tour takes place in members' own homes, it is open only to members and their invited guests, and could be on any day of the week:  I will not be publicising it widely on the internet. 
We have had a lot of enquiries from potential new spinners over the summer, so perhaps the Abergele Guild is heading for a new era with a new venue and new members?!
AC

Natural dyeing day.

On Sunday 14th. July we were Bryn's guests for a dyeing day:  the glorious weather allowed us to spend the entire day outside, where Bryn and Krithia set up a table of pots, pans, gas burners and assorted kit.  We brought our own fibre, already mordanted with alum, and Bryn and Krithia provided red onion skins, madder, logwood and rhubarb root (a mordant and a dye).  A lively breeze made for some entertainment with the gas burners, but there were no actual disasters.  After simmering the fibre in the dyepots (and making sure that the madder didn't get above 60deg. C) we tried the effects of "moderating" the dyes with vinegar or ammonia - with some interesting results.
We were surprised to get such a rich brown from the red onion skins - apparently a yellow or a green are more common.  The madder yielded a beautiful light purple, but then we realised that we had used soft water - hard water is recommended if you want the true madder red.

Red onion skins - which gave a deep brown dye on this occasion.

An amazing deep, deep purple from logwood.

Red onion skin dye!

Beautiful natural colours: logwood, madder (a lovely violet on this occasion as we used soft water "by mistake"), rhubarb and red onion skins.

As a bonus, Bryn had taken inspiration from India Flint (link to India's blog on the righthand side of this page) and prepared some mordanted fabric for us to try "bundle dyeing":  we carefully placed rose petals, red Kentish cob leave and fragments of dyed fibre on the fabric and then rolled, sprayed with water, rolled and sprayed until we had bundles of stuff which we secured with rubber bands.  Bryn kindly steamed the bundles and returned them with instructions to leave them for three months before unwrapping!  Can we wait that long?  (My bundle is quietly cooking inside a plastic bag on the dashboard of my car, and the colour is gradually leaching through to the outside of the fabric.)
Many thanks to Bryn and Krithia for making the day such a success, and thanks to Bryn for allowing us to share her lovely garden.  Congratulations to our newest recruit for picking up the techniques of handspinning so quickly!
AC.

Woodfest Wales, 2013

We were at Woodfest Wales for all three days, and had a great time.
Five of us shared the duties over three days, and brought our own hand made textiles, fleece, dyed and spun yarn to enhance the "core" display of spinning and weaving equipment.
The weather was good, and brought out the crowds - most of whom passed through the Education Tent where we had a good pitch which was easy to see and had plenty of room for people to stand and watch.  Lots of interest, lots of intelligent questions (and hardly any silly ones!) and lots of chat.
Adults and children alike were fascinated by the process, although some of them think that the drive band (the bit of string which goes round and round) is the yarn that's being spun.  They don't think that any more, though!
One or two brave souls had a go themselves, and one lady mastered the art of the drop spindle in seconds having struggled at home on her own for years.  People came from far afield, from Mid-Wales to Cheshire and the Wirral, and we dutifully passed on details of their local Guilds of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers.  We may even have gained some new members ourselves.



The only downside of being so busy at a big show like Woodfest is that we don't really get much chance to look round it ourselves, but most of the usual suspects were assembled including bodgers, chainsaw carvers, pole climbers, ferret handlers, Shire horses, carriages....... makers of furniture, clogs, baskets, mirrors... the list goes on and on.


AC

Abergele WSD flock visit

 

Making history for our Guild, we got out in the field with the Shetlands whose fleece we've been spinning for the last few years. Jenni's flock was excited to see us, too. Perhaps it had something to do with the interesting buckets of feed she was bringing them. For once, the sheep flocked towards the people, providing opportunities to examine the lambs, depth of coats, stroke their hard heads and hear about the lambing statistics this year. Lambs were strong and showed all the colouring variations of their type:  panda-eyed Yuglets, tan Moorits, dark Gulmogets with white bellies, a Mirkface with a white stripe and dark patches on the face. Then there were the rams, tan Moorits with surprising black depths to their fleece.

Walking the fields in bright sunshine and long views down the valley, it was great to be listening to the sheep and dogs. Back indoors there was an impressive display of rosettes and show photos,and a welcome tea.  

B.T.

 

Some new links to inspect.

For those of you who don't do Facebook, or who haven't realised that by clicking on the "Home" button on the top right of our Facebook page you can see some interesting extra stuff:

http://tomofholland.com/ will take you to the blog of Tom, an expatriate Dutchman living in England.  Believe it or not, he darns things.....but he also knits, and his blog has lots of links to follow.  He writes about the Sanquhar glove pattern, which our late member Jean de Salis used to knit.

http://www.shetlandwoolbrokers.co.uk/  Jamieson & Smith, well known to all I'm sure.

http://www.shetlandwoolweek.com/  - fairly obviously, a week's festival of wool in Shetland.

http://www.rozannehawksley.com    Textile artist - you  may have seen her exhibition in Ruthin Craft Centre some years back.
Have fun (and watch this space for a report of our visit to Jenni's flock of pedigree sheep)
AC