Links and recommendations

On Tuesday I had a little frenzy of ordering things.

The first item to arrive dropped through my letterbox yesterday, which was nice and fast!
I'd placed an order with Woven Labels UK for some new labels to sew inside my creations.

I ordered 144 labels, for which I paid a grand total of £5.90, plus 99p postage and packing. Bargain!

I did cheat a little bit - because I didn't want an image or a special font, or my own logo woven onto tape, I actually ordered the school name tapes. Red text on a white background matches my website perfectly, and they look really nice. They do have a really nice selection of fancy labels though, so you could still choose something a bit more dramatic without going the whole hog and paying for your own logo to be done.

This is the second time I've used Woven Labels UK, and I would heartily recommend them.

The other items I ordered might take a little longer - one is fabric from America (more printed cottons from Cia's Palette), and the other is Fair Trade organic cotton from India.



For those of you who are knitters, I am very excited to have been signed up to Ravelry! I haven't added very many details yet, but I have just uploaded lots and lots of photos of knitting to Flickr.

I've also just bought 10 skeins of Colinette Banyan in Neptune. It was a bargain on Ebay, and with all of those lovely patterns on Ravelry, I'm afraid I couldn't resist...

New Toys, or I Love My Yarn Winder.

I have a new yarn winder! It arrived a couple of days ago from Texere. It was quite expensive for a little plastic gadget, but it's definitely going to be worth the money.



The first thing I did when it arrived was to immediately set to work winding balls from the odd skeins of Colinette from my stash. In fact I loved my yarn winder so much that I actually re-wound a couple of balls that I'd previously done by hand, as the little flat "cakes" of yarn that the winder produces are so much nicer! You pull the yarn out from the centre to knit with, so they keep their shape as you work and, they don't roll away across the floor! They also stack really nicely.

I'm working out a pattern for a jumper which I plan to knit using Colinette Cadenza. I really didn't fancy winding five hundred grams of wool into balls by hand, so I'm really pleased that the yarn winder works so well.