June 2012

June arrived and along with it, of course, winter. There were some nasty wet bits and some even nastier cold bits but also some nice sunny bits. In fact the nice sunny bits followed by the wet bits were just about perfect for planting up the bramble slope. We had begged, borrowed or stolen all the new natives over the last year and were able to plant over 200 plants on the slope. Some were so small you couldn't see them from a distance and a few got frosted and completely disappeared but on the whole most of them looked quite happy.

 

After all the plants had been planted, Dave had the enormous job of mulching them all. The mulch was delivered by the truck load over a few weeks and very soon the slope was looking very fine.

And when the weather wasn't so good, there was plenty of fun to be had indoors. I had been intending to learn to spin ever since I got the fleece of our pet lamb Jeff in the 1990s but never quite managed to master it. But then I discovered one of our neighbours was a wonderful spinner and knitter and she agreed to teach me. I had bought a spinning wheel but needed some new bobbins and tried to find some on trademe but instead found a new wheel. It was a bit old and tatty but Dave insisted he wanted to restore it and soon we had a rather lovely new spinning wheel.

Trouble was that it was slightly different from my old one that I wouldnt say that I had mastered but I had managed to produce some 'wool with character' that I managed to use for some rather warm gloves, that might also come in handy should you break your wrist!

And along with a wheel, you need all sorts of other accessories to make this magic wool - a niddy noddy, a swift and a wool winder. Dave leapt to the rescue with all of these and had great fun in the process. Wool winder mark 1 was a two person affair...

 ...while mark 2 was an improvement but didn't quite do the job.

 But mark 3 did pretty well.