The Wool Boat: Creations Chronicle

The Wool Boat: Creations Chronicle

We are still not back in Lancashire, but only just, we are moored just to the south of Preston Brook tunnel on the Trent and Mersey canal, we stayed on the Macclesfield and Peak Forest canal throughout the summer and have now come back up the Trent and Mersey.

We will readily admit that thanks to all the folks that have visited us over the summer we have had a really good time trading, so quite a bit of our yarn stock has turned over which has given us chance to introduce some really nice new yarns, some “Reared, sheared and spun in Britain”, from the likes of  West Yorkshire Spinners and Wooly knits, and we found a replacement for the Wendy Happy 4 ply sock yarn with some classy “Opal” yarn from Germany, which Carole is also using to produce scarves.

The solid colours are called DK Classics and comes in 50 gram balls, priced at £4.00 per ball, and the variegated colours are in the DK Classics colour splash range, again in 50 gram balls and are priced at £4.75 per ball.

While on the right is Cw 1483 Opal knitting Carole of Colin and Carole’s Creations and The Wool Boat knitting with Opal yarn. This yarn is produced in Germany and comes in a wide range of shades. The yarn is 75% wool and 25% Polyamide in a 4 ply weight, ideal for sock knitting but we also have patterns for the scarf in this picture. The yarn comes in 100 gram balls with 425 m of yarn and as at October 2015 costs £8.75 per ball.

The 4th Burscough Fibre Festival

The Grove Station Approach, Burscough 25th October.

For our fourth fibre festival we have once again hired the Grove for a day, and have collected together a range of yarn traders and crafters to sell their wares, along with the now traditional “Knit and Natter” area where people can relax over a brew or more from the café in the Grove. We also have an ice cream van coming this year, though he’ll have to stay outside!

We are being supported by retuning traders from last year and also some new ones, so a good mix to interest all you crafters out there, and how about the canoeists? The Canal and River Trust who are custodians of the inland waterways that we use with “Emma Maye” are setting up a Coast to Coast canoe trail running from Liverpool along the canal and on over to Goole. One of the aims is to get more people, young and old, engaged and interested in the waterways, so they are coming along to the Fibre fest to do some promotion, can we knit life jackets?

A returning stall holder is Natalie Tidy from Knatters Knit who is returning to the festival after a couple of years away and should be bringing her spinning wheel, and Rainy Williamson is heading over from “The Little Lancashire smallholding” near Bolton where she has her own flock of sheep and has recently started to produce her own brand of Lancashire yarn. We also welcome Isabel from a recently opened wool shop over in Formby, “The Good Wool shop”.

Once again the local Queenscourt Hospice shop will be selling donated items of knitwear as a fund raiser for the work they do, and the list of stall holders goes on and on…
The Fibre festival opens at 10 and runs until 4 with judging of the competition being at 3, and it’s still only a pound to get in.