Hi Everyone! Thank you all sooooooo much for participating in my end of year Weaving giveaway!! I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts, your sharing of your own creative goals and inspirations for next year have totally re-invigorated me during this end of year mid-winter slow-down. I have revisited my own goals for 2013, and refined some, added some new ones, and am excited about the directions and possibilities for some more fibery creativity in the coming months. Starting with the Beginners Spindling workshop at Woool in the Hague, I hope the first of many more workshops to come on various topics and in various places! I am also excited about my weaving discoveries and hoping to continue those as i journey down the path of warps and wefts. I have some new ideas for art yarns too, and different ways of preparing fibers that I want to try out, and of course will be sharing those here! With some luck, there may also be some travel for us this year as a family, I would love to visit with my parents and family in New Zealand as soon as we can get our butts over there, but yep, that will take luck AND some seriously careful budgetting. Unless someone invents a Matter Transporter very soon that is, or the Dr drops by in the Tardis and offers us a lift. I also have something exciting coming up in conjunction with Patty, and Louet! Watch this space for more on that one 😛 Finally, I am planning some fun new additions to this website in the coming months! Something that will allow more interaction and participation, I hope!  I will let you know when I am sure my plans can be created as I would like. However, right now, the MOST important thing is, I would like to wish you and your loved ones, a most Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I hope you can share this time with the people most loved by you, doing the things that bring you the most bliss. And if its not Christmas that you celebrate, I hope you still get to take some time out with friends, family, and blissful activities! So now, without further delay     😀     The winner issssssss……     Annie!!!!!!!! I will be emailing you shortly for your postal address and this weaving will soon be winging its way to you! I so wish I could be sending something to everyone who took the time to pop by and comment and share ideas and goals, I hope that at least you might have found something new, interesting, useful, or inspiring in my newsletters this...

Time goes so fast doesn’t it?! I can’t believe we are almost at the end of 2012 already, in some ways it feels like its been just the blink of an eye, but in other ways, thinking back on the things I have done and achieved, its been an incredibly full, exciting, and interesting year! Some highlights for me have been, my One Wheel Indiegogo campaign and all the associated yarns spun to fund my Majacraft Aura, including a feature on the Majacraft blog and the amazing design Andy Poad so skillfully etched on the wheel for me, its truly the One Wheel 🙂 Another highlight of course was the weekend when I received my wheel, unboxing and assembling it during the JazzTurtle workshop at the home of the lovely Alet. That was a magic couple of days, meeting Esther Rodgers, sharing the learning experience with some amazing women, and enjoying the lovely environment so generously provided by Alet.  The next highlight for me was taking part in the Leather and Lace secret stash challenge, dreamed up and hosted by the lovely Arlene of Spin Artiste, and Deb Lambert of Picasso’s Moon. This was a huge honour for me, it was set up by invitation, and I was so excited to see my name and yarn among those of my fiber heros such as Lexi Boeger, and Ashley Martineau, in total about 20 spinners whose work I utterly admire. This travelling yarn show is now progressing along the East coast of the US and will reach its final destination in April at the SWAY Guild Art Yarn Festival, where the yarns will be auctioned, with proceeds donated to the Farm Animal Sanctuary. Another Spin Artiste highlight for me has been the opportunity to make some guest posts for Arlene, interviewing some very talented fiberistas on this side of the planet, what an honour and a pleasure! Other writing this year included the ‘Spinners Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocolypse’ for the Entangled Magazine, as well as a feature of one of my yarns in the ‘Fiber Lust’ section of the same edition!  I also have an article coming in the next edition of the Dutch magazine the ‘Spin en Verfkrant’ – soon to be known as ‘Vezels’ (Fibers). I am looking forward to that and will let you know when its out. Another highlight has truly been the Find Your Inner Fiber Hero Workshop I hosted and taught right here in the WoolWench house at the beginning of the month. It was a real thrill to see people enjoying fiber, making new discoveries, helping each other, and just generally being as excited about spinning as I am!  I am thrilled to have had...

What a day! Saturday 8th of December, a thick layer of snow on the ground, a cosy house, a table full of colourful fibers, and a room full of women with wheels! Sounds like the perfect day to me, and it was! You know there are some days that are just so cool you know that they will go down in personal history as ‘one of the epic ones’, and I think last Saturday was one of those for me. First of all, what a wonderful group of spinners, coming through my front door with their wheels, fibers, and bobbins. Everyone was happy, chatting, checking out each others wheels and wool. I was very happy to find that I really did have enough room, and enough chairs! And also very happy that Patty and Sally had volunteered to come along and look after the teas coffees and lunch preparation for me. This was good, this meant we did eat, and received enough cups of hot brew to get through the day without falling off our chairs faint with hunger and dehydration! Thanks girls, I am quite sure I never would have managed that without you! XX It was lovely to finally meet everyone in person, some faces were already very familiar to me from Facebook, and it was great to see things in real life, like Tinekes awesome sparkly bobble hat that she bought along, and the lovely hand dyed fibers that Peti had been preparing before the workshop. We started out talking about what kinds of yarns everyone was interested in making, and it seemed a fairly good consensus that bulky singles were a desirable goal, as well as coils, thick and thin puffy yarn, and core spinning. Its funny how pretty much every spinner starts out making nice big chunky yarns, then we gradually refine our technique, gain control over the fibers and our drafting, and are soon making those lovely fine singles we started out wishing we could do. Then one day we think, I want a bit chunky yarn now, to make something cuddly for winter, and we start spinning, only to find that the fine yarn keeps coming back! Its like our hands and feet are now programmed to make this, and only this, and have totally wiped from memory the chunky yarn skill we started out with! Well during the workshop we did a little bit about this, using a roving (top) to draft nice thick quantities, keeping our hands loose to spin the air into the yarn.. and to follow this up I will also be making a newsletter to send out this week with an extra mini tutorial on spinning bulky yarns. We...

Firstly – I am also working on a Workshop post so I can share with you all the amazing yarns that were made right here in my living room on Saturday! What a wonderful bunch of women with wheels it was, and the creative energy was amazing! I am just waiting on some photos to give you a really nice visual impression, and then I will make the post later today or tomorrow morning, so watch this space for some serious eye candy! In the meantime however, I have something really REALLY exciting to share with you, and I cant tell you how thrilled to bits I am to be able to do it! There are some major advantages to being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people, and I am lucky enough to have gotten all those things happily together so that I can today, right here, share with you some exciting news from Louet! Yes! They have JUST released their brand spanking new, first ever, ART YARN FLYER  prototype for the Louet S10!! I know a wonderful woman who lives right here in the Netherlands, Patty Poot. She sold me my gorgeous Saori Loom, and she is also a Louet Dealer. She was kind enough to bring this totally new prototype along to the workshop I hosted for us to see and try out! She has spent some months following up the progress of this flyer with the Louet company, who  responded brilliantly to her suggestions in making this excellent addition to the very popular Louet S10 (and S17) wheel, they have clearly put a lot of thought and practical design into this flyer. And it all came together at just the right time for its very first ever world debut right here during my Inner Fiber Hero Workshop on Saturday!! And to add even more to the happy coincidences, one of the spinners attending our workshop had driven a long way to get here, with her Louet S10, and on arrival realised she had everything, except the flyer! SO of course, the prefect timing for the art yarn flyer to come out of its pristine box and set up on its first S10 experience outside of the factory or Pattys’ house, its first public showing, and filling in during a time of dire need. Guess what, it was awesome, and the other example Patty had brought along was soon installed on another S10 as well and was seriously flying in every sense of the word. Check out this really beautiful yarn spun by Peti on her now permanently art yarn flyer equipped wheel.  Yep, Patty sold both these flyers on...

Hi everyone! Here we are on the Eve of our ‘Find your Inner Fiber Hero’ workshop, and for sure we will be finding those heros before we even touch the fiber, because its been snowing a LOT and just getting here for the workshop is going to be an heroic effort! I am wishing everyone a safe journey and you can be sure of a warm welcome, a hot cuppa, and some wicked fibers to play with when you get here XX Number 2 on the list today – I want to start a new project, and this needs YOU! A couple of years ago I took part in a travelling canvas collaboration, me and 5 other artists shared a canvas! It travelled around the world, UK, US, Netherlands, and we ended up with an amazing and unexpected painting! It was so exciting to get the canvas in the post and see what the previous person had done on it! In that collaboration each addition was kept secret, and at the end there was a big reveal, it was really exciting to see the end result in its entirety. So maybe you just saw I had posted about an idea for making a Travelling Hat Collaboration, well being me, a think it-do it kinda person, I was a bit quick off the mark, I had totally forgotten a conversation I had with someone a few days ago about doing something else along these lines. The idea was different but with a very similar concept. So now I am here to let you know that the project will go ahead, but I need to work on some details with this person! She is an amazing spinner and dyer, and I really dont want to miss the opportunity to work with her, that would be insane, so let us work out some more details and add some cool extra stuff to this project and turn it into something even BIGGER than my single sieve-like brain can work out on its own, something global, something that has its roots in the big picture, because clearly, I have been too busy for optimum brain function and not organised enough to do this on my own! So watch this space, those of you have have already sent in your willingness to participate and postal addresses, I will keep you on the list and contact you directly as soon as the details are worked...