Knitting the Gro Hat By Fiber Tales
Hello friends,
I have a knitting project start and finish to show you today. Ever since I finished my latest blanket some months ago, I've been procrastinating over which knitting project to do/finish next.
I've got a pair of socks, and also a set of leg warmers on the go, but I wasn't feeling like working on them while it was so warm outside. And then I wasn't happy with my socks so I frogged them, and then procrastinated some more about knitting the yarn up with a different sock pattern..
But then while I was cleaning up my craft room I found a knitting project bag with 100 grams of DK weight possum/merino yarn that I'd hand dyed a sage green for a knitting project with the pattern Gro Hat by Fiber Tales. I instantly fell back in love with the project, especially the leaf pattern around the hat, and started knitting the pattern.
First up I needed to learn a new cast on method for the edge of the hat, Italian Tubular cast on, which ended up being similar to other cast on methods I've learned, so that was okay. Then I knitted the ribbing at the bottom of the hat, which folded over at the end. After that was switching needles to a bigger size, and plain knitting for a while. All that was relatively easy.
After that came all the hard parts, and at this stage I wish I had put in a safety line before the cable and lace section, as it would've made the pattern knitting way less stressful. My advice to anyone considering this pattern would be to do the following in the cable and lace sections: put in a safety line at the start, put stitch markers and the beginning of each repeated section, so it's easy to frog back to a section in a row if necessary. And the last thing I would suggest is to knit the k1yok1 repeats much looser than you think, because if that repeat is too tight, it makes it super hard to do the cables in the next row.
Once the tricky part of the cables and lace work is done, the rest of the hat is pretty easy to knit until the finish. I have done both cables and lace work in knitting before, but this pattern was tricky for me to do. Just a thing to note is that this pattern has only one size, and you can't upscale it or downscale it easily without ruining the repeats.
And here is the finished Gro Hat knitted up before blocking, as you can see, you can see the stitches between the DPNs, are slightly wider vertical rows. It was unfortunate, but I hoped it would come out in blocking.
I gave the hat a nice and long soaking in luke warm water and wool wash, and then blocked the hat using a head mannequin covered in a plastic bag.
And here is the finished hat.
I absolutely love the finished hat, and especially in the sage colour, as it just really matches so well with the leaves. I'm glad that I stuck it out and finished the hat despite the trickiness of the cable and lace section. I think the pattern is totally worth knitting but it's good to be aware of the trickiness. I can't wait to wear this hat all winter long.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Gotland Fleece Project - Scouring, Washing, and Storing
Hello friends,
Back in April 2023 my husband and I went on a road trip to the Mackenzie country to celebrate our wedding anniversary. On the way home we stopped off at The Oamaru Textile Emporium (TOTE) to do a little crafting shopping. I'd been eyeing up their raw fleeces online, and spent some time in the store when I got there, going through all the raw fleeces they had available until I found the one I'd been looking for.
I've wanted to process and spin a Gotland sheep fleece for a while, and they had this beautiful chocolate grey fleece in the store. It came home with us, making the whole car smell quite sheepy as we traveled back to Dunedin...
When we got it home, I took the fleece out of it's plastic bag, and laid it out to see exactly what I had bought.
Back when I lived in Wellington I belonged to Creative Fibre New Zealand, and was an active member of the Tawa Fibrecrafts group. One of the many benefits of belonging to Creative Fibre NZ is taking part in one of their many courses, including one I attended on choosing raw fleeces, sorting them, and processing them.
I was very happy with the fleece when I laid it out, there were no second cuts, the fleece was in great condition, and all the unspinnable parts of the fleece had already been removed for me.
I invested in two books, The Spinner's Book of Fleece by Beth Smith, and Camaj Fibre Art's The Art of Washing Wool, Mohair, and Alpaca by Mary Egbert. These two books told me everything I needed to know about scouring and washing gotland fleece. Recently, now in 2025, I decided to scour and wash the Gotland fleece using Unicorn Fiber Power Scour, which is a wonderful detergent for scouring and washing unwashed fleeces. It's very gentle, but also removes all the dirt and lanolin from a fleece.
Filling a 6L tub with 60˚C water from out of our laundry room tap, I mixed in the calculated amount of Unicorn Scour Power mentioned on the bottle, and added the Gotland fleece which I'd put into laundry bags, and left each bag one at a time to gently soak in the scouring mix for 15 minutes.
As you can see from the photos, the scouring water turned a very muddy brown during the process, as the dirt and lanolin was removed from the fleece.
At the end of 15 minutes I lifted the laundry bag full of fleece out of the dirty water, and very gently squeezed out all the excess liquid. I then rinsed out the plastic tub to remove all the dirt and liquid, and then filled the tub back up with clean, hot water. I put the laundry bag back into the tub to rinse out the fleece for a minute with gentle swishing, to help remove even more dirt and lanolin from the fleece. At the end of this, I lifted out the laundry bag, removed the clean fleece, and then spun it in a hand-cranked salad spinner until it was as dry as it could be. From there, the fleece was placed in plastic containers which had good ventilation holes, they were laid out in the sun over the next couple of days until the fleece was dry.
Once dried, I placed most of the Gotland fleece into a brown paper shopping bag, and put it away in storage.
I flick carded a small sample of Gotland fleece remaining, so I could check the quality, and as you can see, the resulting clean fleece has a beautiful crimp, and the colour is a dark smoky grey/brown colour.
The handle is very soft, and over the coming months, I'll slowly flick card and then spin up some Gotland fleece singles. From the resulting yarn, I think I'll make a cozy winter jersey.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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On The Porch Blanket by Fifty Four Ten Studios
Hello friends,
I have finally finished my On The Porch Blanket by Fifty Four Ten Studios, which I started back in 2021. It was a long haul over the last couple of years to knit it, as each row took about 15 minutes to knit. I had at times left it in my knitting bag untouched for months, as it was a pretty boring knit, even though it was good for watching TV. I finally got around to finishing it over the summer while I was watching the cricket on TV.
The blanket was knitted with a dark gray double knit possum/merino yarn cone I bought from a WoolYarns outlet sale when I still lived in Wellington, and I used size 4 mm needles for knitting it. The final dimensions for the blanket were 1.15 m wide by 1.25 m tall.
I love using possum/merino yarn for blankets, as it's very soft and squishy, which is great for cuddling up with in winter. My plan is to keep the blanket in my craft room/office, and to use the blanket to keep me toasty on cold, frosty days.
I'm so pleased to finally have this knitting project done, it gives me time to also get around to finishing knitting a sock project for autumn and winter.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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May Handmaiden Spinning Fibre Club
Hello friends,
Today I'd like to share with you my May Handmaiden Spinning Fibre Club subscription, and how it looks now all spun up.
May's Handmaiden Fibre club, in autumnal shades of white, brown, orange and red, arrived all prettily wrapped up in tissue paper, and contained 100 grams of 80% machine-washable wool/20% nylon, a small plastic sock stitch marker, and a pattern for making Tinker Bell slippers. I decided to spin it up fine so I could make socks, so I broke the fibre braid in half to make a 2-ply, and then pulled out my trusty rimu drop spindle and got to work.
I love spinning with my drop spindle, because it's the easiest way to spin up super fine yarn for making socks, and it also increases the spinning time, which I find very relaxing. It took me a couple of weeks to spin up the two fine singles, and I loved the slow changing autumnal colours on my drop spindle as I spun.
I transferred the singles of yarn off the drop spindle and onto two spinning wheel bobbins for plying. Once that was done it didn't take very long at all to ply up the resulting 2 ply yarn on my Majacraft Suzie Pro spinning wheel. I prefer plying on my spinning wheel, as my drop spindle can't handle large amounts of plied yarn.
The plied yarn was in general fingering weight, and the autumnal colours were very pretty. After the plied yarn rested for a couple of days, I set the yarn by washing it in luke-warm soapy water.
The yarn is now all dry, and waiting to be knitted up. The final yarn is 2 ply, and is 265.5 m long.
Once a couple of other knitting projects are completed, I will be knitting up this hand spun yarn into socks.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
A Road Trip, A Fibre Festival, and A Raffle
Hello friends,
It's been a couple of weeks since my last blog post, but I've been busy, with a friend coming down from Wellington to visit us for a week. We got up to a lot of crafty things while she was here, and we spent many relaxing afternoons sitting on the couch watching disaster movies and knitting and spinning.
One of the highlights of the week was a road trip from Dunedin to Gore for the 45˚Fibre Festival in Gore on Saturday the 4th of May. We got up early on Saturday morning and headed off on our road trip down south.
It was cool but dry morning, and two hours later we made it to Gore, and excitedly found our way to the Gore Town and Country Club for the Fiber Festival.
Outside the venue we were greeted with some great fiber based art installations.
Once inside the fibre festival we were overwhelmed with a large number of yarn and fibre traders waiting for our patronage. There were local farmers selling raw and processed fleeces, indie dyers and yarn traders from all over the country, and other traders selling all sorts of yarn and fibre accessories.
After wandering around and getting an idea of what was for sale, it was time to shop. I had saved up a lot of crafty pocket money for this event, and it was time to fulfill my wish list.
First up was purchasing some more Unicorn Power Scour from Unicorn Fibre Cleaners NZ. I'm currently in the middle of processing two raw fleece projects (blog posts to come), and I've found that Unicorn Power Scour is the most gentle, easy, and efficient fleece cleaner I've ever used. I'll never process fleeces any other way now.
Next on my shopping list, was a skein of 4 ply yarn for making a pair of socks. After wandering around for a while, I found the perfect colour at Dye Studio 54, who had 100 grams of Sparkle Sock in the colourway Belladonna. It was a perfect combination of purple and sparkles, and I can't wait to knit it up so I can have sparkly warm feet for winter.
As a spinner I always like to pick up some dyed fibre to spin, and I found two preparations at the Handmade Fibre Crafts stall. I picked up 100 grams of dyed merino combed top with silk and viscose in shades of orange, white and pinks. I also grabbed 50 grams of dyed Corriedale combed top with mulberry silk in shades of orange. I figured the two preparations would work well together in a future project (unknown project at this time).
Next up it was time to check out two of my favorite fibre processors. I also love to dye my own fibre, so I headed first to Tally-Ho who prepare the most amazing combed white Merino. It's always so fine and white and clean, which makes it the perfect fibre to dye with. I grabbed a total of 500 grams of fibre, and was very happy with my purchase.
And lastly I stopped in at Fine Fibre Farms, where they were selling 500 gram bags of white Polwarth Combed Top, which I could not resist. Polwarth is my favorite fibre and yarn of all time to work with, and it is relatively hard to get as undyed fibre in New Zealand. I am very much looking forward to dyeing and spinning this polwarth fibre.
And with that done, I had spent all my crafty pocket money, so I visited the sheep and alpaca animals on display outside the venue, and even got to pat them.
After all that, we were quite hungry, so we enjoyed some Thai chicken noodle soup and wontons for lunch from one of the food vendors, and it was so perfect and spicy and warm to eat outside on a cool autumn day.
After lunch it was back into the venue, and we wandered around the traders some more. At this point we visited Purple Sprouting, where they had a wonderful selection of sock yarn. I fell in love with another sock yarn colourway, but had no money left to buy it. My wonderful friend then stepped in, and bought me a skein of 4 ply Bluefaced Leicester sock yarn in the colourway Meadow Mornings (Almost) as a thank you for me hosting her for the week. I was so excited about this, and the yarn is already on my knitting needles to knit a pair of socks.
And just when I thought it was all over, we happened to walk past Spinning Wood Designs, who handcraft spinning drop spindles and fibre tools in South Canterbury. And it was there I found the wrist distaff I've been searching for in New Zealand for the past two years. And before you could blink an eyelid, I'd picked out a distaff and handed over my credit card, overjoyed that I'd finally found one. I knew hubby wouldn't mind that I overspent my crafty budget for this, as I have been talking about getting a wrist distaff for a long time.
And with that done it was nearly time to go home. All that remained was staying for the raffle drawing, as I had used the $1 I had left in my purse to buy one raffle ticket for the spinning prize. And after telling my friend that I never, ever won raffle prizes, I won!
I was so happy and excited and grateful to win the raffle, as it was filled with lots of goodies I knew I would love to use. Once we got home, I unpacked the raffle prize, and shared my spoils with hubby and my friend.
I gave hubby the giant Toblerone chocolate bar gifted from Unicorn Fibre Cleaners, and I gave my friend the Purple Sprouting sock yarn pack, and kept all the spinning goodies for myself (my friend isn't a spinner). My prizes included a 1 kg bump of naturally dyed romney from Tally Ho Carding, a 1 kg Carousel Collection of Merino also from Tally Ho Carding, a packet of Ashford Angelina silver sparkles to add to fibre projects, and an Ashford Turkish drop spindle.
I was especially excited about the Turkish drop spindle prize, as it had been on my wish list of fibre tools for a long time. I can't wait to learn how to use it, and thanks to all the fibre I bought and that I won in the raffle, I will have plenty of fibre to practice on.
And with the wonderful fibre festival day at an end, my friend and I headed back home to recover, and play with all our new yarn and fibre goodies...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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