Wonderwool Wales

OK, I’m very late with this, but it’s still worth updating!

Wonderwool Wales is a fibre festival which takes place at the Royal Welsh Showground in Llanelwedd at the end of April. It is brilliant and temptation abounds. It is also not far from us, so I make my annual pilgrimage. (Last year the Little Boy was only 8 days old, and people were surprised that I was out fibre-ing. Only people who didn’t really know me, of course!He slept through the whole thing in his sling, waking up for the occasional feed. This year I left the children at home!).

Anyway, here are some pictures from this year’s event.

Displays of roving always look so wonderful and make me want to learn to spin even more than I do already. I fear spinning is going to have to wait until that mythical time when the children are at school and I have more time…

This stall sold, among other things, the most wonderful embroidery threads:

Oh, these were pretty – old bobbins sold with roving. I have no use for roving as yet so I didn’t buy any, but I do like old bobbins!

As well as the processed materials, there are lots of stands with sheep on. I forget which breed these are – I’ll have to look it up.

And finally, these wraps left over the backs of some chairs caught my eye. Lovely colours!

I bought some stitch markers and three skeins of hand dyed yarn – two sock and one lace weight. This counts as comparatively restrained!

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The sewing news…

is that I have finally cut out my first patchwork quilt. It was good fun (my word, there’s a lot of ironing involved) and I am very glad I borrowed a rotary cutter (although I do need practice at using it). I had a very kind helper who gave me a hand with the process of cutting and laying, which was brilliant as I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I had to do quite a lot of shuffling as I didn’t have as much of some of the fabrics as I’d have liked, but I’m quite pleased with how it looks.

And now the easy bit done, I need to actually do the sewing…

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April shower

Another one from the archive…

I seem to have a bit of a thing for photographing water drops on trees, and here’s another one which I took after a rainshower last month.

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Spring flowers

Here’s a little catch up of some of the pictures I have taken over the last six weeks or so. Spring has definitely sprung.

Hellebore:

Primroses:

Violets (with moth):

Celandine and wood anemone – by the way, I think the other name for the wood anemone, the windflower, is totally beautiful:

And finally, cherry blossom:

It’s apple blossom time here at the moment, which is one of my favourite times of year. I love photographing apple blossom – as you can see from the blog banner, which was last year’s blossom – because the shades of colour are so varied, but it’s uniformly beautiful. No doubt I’ll be back with apple blossom pictures soon.

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Smallholders’ Fair

This weekend is the Smallholders’ Fair at the Royal Welsh Showground. It is one of the highlights of our year, and this year, we were lucky enough to get free tickets, which was a bonus.

It was a lovely sunny day, so we equipped ourselves with sunscreen and provisions, and off we went.

First stop was the poultry, as we wanted to replace our Rhode Island Red who, unfortunately, was killed by a friend’s Jack Russell. We couldn’t just buy one hen – so we bought four: a new Rhodey, but also a Speckledy, a Bluebell and a Light Sussex. They’re a bit shy at the moment, so no pictures yet.

Here are some of the hens, ducks, doves:

Next came the goats:

And the pigs:

And we watched a bit of pig-judging – the chap in the bowler hat is the judge, and he came all the way from Yorkshire, apparently. Serious business, this.

Then I left Mr SowandSew and the children eating cake while I went to buy plants. I got some herbs, strawberry plants, a few veg plants and some fuschias.

I also looked at some of the plant displays:

I am always amused by the styling of vegetables at shows like this.

So, all in all, a very successful day. I now have a lot of new plants to plant, so this coming week is going to be gardening catch up week.

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Oh dear, oh dear.

No blog for a while, as life, work, everything went crazy. We’ve both been really busy, we’ve had year end, and we have not been in the best health. Put it this way, between the four of us, we’ve been to the doctor so many times since March, the receptionists now recognise us. The Little Boy, in particular, has been quite ill, and we’re waiting to see the paediatrician to find out what’s wrong.

But life has gone on, things have been made, eaten and sown. I have taken lots of pictures, but Project 356 will have to be shelved to wait for another year.

I will put together some collections of some of my favourite photos, though, so you can see a bit of what I’ve been up to.

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