White Rabbit Handmade

Yesterday I broke out if the baby bubble and went to a class with a few wonderful friends at and I had the best time!! I really like colourwork but like most my knitted skills ive learned from reading patterns and guessing, and is so great to learn new skills from someone who knows what they are doing and teaches so clearly!! (And can demonstrate how to hold your yarn three different ways to avoid tangling the two colours!) Pics are of my sample which I steeked in class and will keep forever, the pic of the two knitted tubes together is to show how crazy tight my tension was yesterday compared to Haha.

Today, I was lucky enough to go on a tour of and see how the yarn gets made on a large scale! It surprised me that the mill was actually a lot smaller than I had imagined, given the amount of yarn produced, and I loved seeing all the specialised machines in action I also enjoyed picking up a few balls to add to the stash and some acrylic to try crocheting some little cat toys.

A very rough outline of the process is the fibre gets cleaned and processed overseas then comes to bendigo in bales, these are blended and carded then spun and plied into various thicknesses. The undyed yarn is wound into 2kg hanks and put in a massive machine to dye (72kg at a time!) Then rinsed, spun and dried and then wound from the hank into a cone and from the cone into the 200g balls!

Another finished object post! This is the Lionberry shawl by a beautiful crescent shawl with lots of different stitches to keep me entertained.
I made this for my mum in my 4ply in the colourway Watermelon sugar