Tam Number Three

I started counting because I'm aiming to make one hundred and one. There's a nice moment when making a tam, rather like the last move in a string figure when you open it up and the pattern is displayed clearly for the first time. This is keeping me intrigued.
If Mr JB should look at this, yes, it is your design, but I haven't done the pattern quite how you said because I was experimenting with the traditional colours and how they combine.
I've used indigo, madder and safflower again and the colours have chaanged depending on whether they have yellow next to the blue or red. The pattern would probably work quite well in black and white.

A More Traditional Tam

I've now branched out from Mary Rowe's book and into new territory (though rather old territory, really). I designed this man's sized tam and used an eight point star for the wheel pattern, rather than Mary's seven section wheel. The pattern I drafted quite a few times in different variations while gazing at the coloured photo of tams in Sheila McGregor's Traditional Fair Isle book. I kept redoing it to suit the colours as they looked when I knitted them. The wool is my handspun dyed with madder (red), indigo (blue), and safflower (yellow). There are also three natural wool colours there. I liked the rather 1930s look to the colour scheme.
Because I am cutting grass every day for the cow with a scythe I feel a hay rake might be helpful so I'm hoping to be able to trade this tam for one. I do know the Oamaru maker of hay rakes would like a traditional tam.

Tons of Tammies

I've always loved looking at photos of tam o'shanters and wondering how to shape the wheel pattern in the centre, but until I bought Mary Rowe's book on tammies I didn't have the vital clues that make it possible to make tammies of any size and have them lie perfectly flat when they're finished. Now a new world has opened to me. I find them endlessly fascinating and I've been spending time designing my own, spinning and dyeing the wool to make them, knitting up samples from bits and pieces of wool and persuading my friends and their friends and relations to draw up designs for me.
This is the first patterned tam I've made to my own design, but I've got quite a few designs now ready to be made. I used some Jamieson and Smith 2-ply for this but from now on I'll use my own handspun.

For Sun Splashed Days

A few months ago a friend and I went op shopping in Dunedin and I picked up some rather conservative looking blue wool for $15 which seems like a lot of money to someone who usually spins their own. I worried about how to make it pay for itself and ended up making this pattern from 1938. It's in A Stitch in Time - the first edition. The original pattern tells you what to wear with the jumper. If you make it in cornflower blue, for instance, you need a blue linen skirt, a rose pink scarf, a blue flower clip and navy blue shoes. As I didn't have any of these essentials I made a tammie from the same wool and a skirt from a bit of left over woolen fabric I found in a cupboard. It turned out quite well.

Bushfire Socks

When the Victorian bushfire appeal was launched there was a number of donations of wool offered to people who donated cash to the appeal. I discovered this on ravelry.com and was lucky enough to be one of the winners. The wool was donated by The Loopy Ewe as was the pattern, which is Cookie A's Zanzibar Socks. It's merino wool which I imagine probably came from Australia originally. It was then spun and dyed in Germany, made its way to North America and then travelled all the way back to New Zealand. I thought of sending the socks on to Australia when they were finished, but I'm in need of socks and the wool has probably clocked up a large enough carbon footprint in its career so it had better stay here.
So with thanks to The Loopy Ewe, here are the finished socks:

Garden of Flowers Rug

This rug is the result of having a large stash of handspun wool which was fairly coarse and a very tatty old mat in the doorway which was irritating me. The pattern is adapted from a cushion design in a book called Ethnic Needlepoint but I made it in cross stitch and elongated it to make it more ruglike.
The dyes I used include eucalyptus, lichen, cochineal, brazilwood, nettles, onion skins and madder. It took a lot longer to make than I expected so I hope it lasts for a while so I don't need to make another.

Tartan Grand Final

The bookbinder in person came to finish off the final section of the tartan. He showed a remarkable aptitude for weaving which is not surprising in one so skilled in other crafts. We'd saved him the most difficult part to test his resolve.


Note the matching tartans.






Cutting the warp with his dirk. This is an ancient Oamaruvian tradition.





And the (almost) finished cloth. It just needs fulling now, and we hope it doesn't shrink too much. Thankfully all the stripes seem to be in the right places.