It’s a special and sentimental thing when you can create from the very beginning of your supplies all the way up to using your finished craft. That is why I love being a Roving producer.
At our small farm in Maryland, I have a number of fiber animals. I mainly focus on being an Angora and Colored Angora Goat breeder. However, over the years we’ve had lots of other fiber and fun critters: llama, alpaca, and cashmeres to name a few. I really enjoy shearing their marvelous fiber gift and turning it into something.
I am a fiber artist, so the raw fiber gets cleaned and dyed, then combed or carded. This milling process makes turns what I do into a fluffy and puffy rope of unspun colorful fibers. And, hand spinners, knitters and crafters use the roving to make all kinds of wonderful finished wearables and crafts.
My good friend, Kathleen @CraicpotWoolWorks bought some of my really popular “Sea Glass” Roving. I dyed our own farm mohair and local wool and alpaca fibers in shades I thought you’de see at the beach if you found a piece of sea glass. Then Kathleen spun the roving into her own yarn! She found a pattern she like from Alice Starmore’s book “Aran Knitting” and made this hat.
On a final happy note, the cover photo was taken at an outdoor coffee together because she was toasty warm with her new hat.
Hi everybody, this is Kathleen from Craicpot Woolworks. Some people were asking about my hat. I cannot take credit for the gorgeous pattern, it is called Kittiwake and was written by the great Alice Starmore and can be found in her Bible of all things cabled “Aran Knitting”
(https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/kittiwake). It is not simple or quick, but it is gorgeous and classic. She used a yarn called Scottish Fleet, obviously, I used my own attempt at hand spun. Enjoy!!!