Planting our carrot seeds

As you may know, Laura at Cupcakes for Clara recently started a little experiment, to see whether carrots would grow from the carrot seeds in some paper she made. She asked if anyone else wanted to try, and I thought it sounded like fun for me and my Laura, so I asked her to send some of the paper over.

Laura was very excited!



She put the bits of paper in the pots and covered them with compost:



Then she gave them plenty of water:



And I put them on the kitchen window sill to get plenty of sunshine (you can tell this was earlier in the week, there's snow on the climbing frame!):



So thank you Laura (both Lauras!), let's see if we get any carrots! Laura (my Laura) says she might even eat them if we do.

(apologies for all the photos in this post, it was just starting to get dark when we had time to plant the seeds and my little camera didn't like it)

Wordless Wednesday

Handspun Scarf

As I think I said before, one of the items on my Day Zero list was to spin enough yarn to make a scarf. I used the wool I bought at the Knitting & Stitching Show. And now it is finished!

I thought about spinning and plying all the yarn, then alternating skeins so that my uneven spinning at the start would not be as obvious. But I was impatient to start knitting it up and also I thought it would be a fun illustration of how much my spinning improved just over that much fibre. Which is the explanation for this, the starting end:



Very lumpy! But as I progressed I definitely improved. The first yarn was very overspun; by halfway down the scarf I was spinning much more evenly and the yarn was softer. I didn't separate out the colours, just span it as it came, which made it nice and tweedy.



The scarf is blocking now. It's not actually long enough for a scarf, so I'm going to sew it round into a cowl and add some pretty buttons. The blocking has made the overspun yarn bloom a bit and hopefully it will even out the width. But I'm pretty proud of myself! And I've even finished another item from handspun, more about that another day!

Linking up to Making Monday with Natalie and Handmade Monday with Handmade Harbour. Lots of lovely blogs on both of those so check them out!

Wordless Wednesday