Handspun Yarn, Spinning & Knitting - Hang-out with Handmaiden - July 2026

Hey I'm Amy of Handmaiden and this is my monthly podcast where I let you know or show you anything that I've created in the past month and what I've been making personally and also anything that's new on the website for Handmaiden or things that are up and coming and happening for Handmaiden. So first up I'm wearing my very recently finished sheep sweater. I've called it the winter sheep sweater because I felt like it looked like a snow storm, like a winter snow storm with all these white fleece stitches. Yeah all made in my hand spun yarn and yeah they're all natural colors like all the browns and the gray or even the black there's like a charcoal in there all natural fleece colors. I saw a image of a similar yoke on Instagram and it really inspired me and I really wanted to make that sweater. So I got some graph paper. I know there's lots of apps online to do your color work designs and stuff but I do like a piece of paper and basically went from there on the graph paper and how I imagined the pattern repeat to be and then plugged that pattern or that color work on design that I did on the graph paper plugged it into my go-to top down in the round sweater and there we have it. I'm very happy it was very enjoyable to make, hard to put down especially because I made the yoke design myself on this piece of paper. I really just wanted to knit another round to see if it was actually going to work. So yeah it was exciting and great to use all my hand spun. There's a whole different energy when you knit with your yarn that you've made yourself like hand spun yarn is so special. It is some of my very early hand spun, I don't know if I can show you on here, but it's more textured than yarn I'm creating now. There's definitely more hand spun look to it and I can see the slight over twist in some of it as well but it's made a beautiful fabric for very early hand spun yarn. I'm also happy to have it out of my stash of hand spun because tauty fleece is happening at the moment but we're spinning through to the end of the weekend right through the 26th of July so we'll finish on Sunday. So I'm making a lot more hand spun yarn so it was good to make a wee spot on the shelf ready to put in the new hand spun that I've been making this year. Yeah so winter sheet sweater, it isn't really a pattern but I could link that in the show notes below. I could link the inspiration, yeah go from there. Other finished objects this past month was concentric so I shared in last month's video some yarns and patterns and things I'd got overseas on my Alaskan adventure and there was this beautiful silk and alpaca skein from Dragon Yarns in Seattle and I'd also got a cone of sequins that had those little flowery sequins. So I held the sequin strand and the beautiful silk alpaca together and you basically make, yeah cast on quite a lot of stitches and then cast them off again after a few rows and these actually, I've done three strands, you decrease the amount of stitches you cast on in each loop so that each loop's actually a little bit smaller but it's basically like a knitted necklace but it's also like a wee scarf because it keeps, it's just enough on the back of your neck that keeps the back of your neck warm. Very happy with how it turned out and on Ravelry I found, this was called concentric, it was a free pattern I got in a Seattle yarn shop but on Ravelry there's one called seven circles, a pattern, seven circle, very much the same only more of these knitted rings if you like and there's lots of variations to the pattern. Some people on the Ravelry projects have made six and people have done all different colours like rainbows and you can do them separate like rather than having them attached as one in here, you could have just done individual rings and then you could layer up the colours or wear them however you like. Very happy with that and the sequins really do make them a little bit special, add a bit more to it. So yeah that's it and I think the yarn really made this pattern successful by being so drapey, that silk alpaca and it just drapes and sits so nice. I was thinking of like a really woollen spun fluffy like hand spun that kind of holds itself up whilst I don't know if it would drape and be given quite the same effect in this pattern. So yeah really happy with the drape and how nice that one falls. Then the other pattern, again overseas pattern, was Smithfield Hat and I bought a skein from Lamb & Kit when I was on Bainbridge Island. Here is my finished Smithfield Hat. I've had a great month doing these small projects, so much fun. Really nice simple cable that's done over eight stitches. Yeah this is a yak and cashmere blend and it was the Lamb & Kit skein. Again bought the green because I like to wear this colour, it makes the green in my eyes really pop and it's got like a little soft halo. I wish I'd done a little bit more, maybe another cable. It doesn't quite keep my ears as cosy as I wished it would. Like when you've got your hair out it, the hair helps keep your ears warm. I would have liked maybe a tiny bit more length, I could have done a longer rib or maybe another cable repeat. But super cosy, very happy with that and the pattern had multiple sizes, like right down to a baby. So definitely a useful pattern. Yeah very nice soft yarn. What else did I make? The Orbit Shawl, well it's just called Orbit, but it's like an asymmetrical shawl and again, I don't have many layers of knitwear on today, a one skein wonder. I got this skein, I think it was in Ketchikan, it was a Juicy DK and it's a Farmer's Daughter fibre yarn. But I loved all the colours in this skein. So the Orbit is just rows and rows of garter stitch and then when you get sick of doing garter stitch, you do a yard over row and it makes those beautiful eyelets in there. The shawl can be finished with a nice eyelet, I mean a yarn over kind of lace on the end, but I skipped that out just because I wanted to fully use up my skein of yarn. So this is a bit bigger than the actual pattern, I just kept going until I used up my yarn, but hopefully I had enough, yeah I lived enough to cast off. So it's asymmetrical, which is quite hard to show you on here. One of them arms is a bit longer than the other. I like to just wear it, I do tend to put the point of the centre of the shawl in the long, sometimes I knot it off to the side. Super squishy and nice thing, garter stitch. So yeah, Orbit shawl, with that one underneath it. Very happy with that, got lots of nice colours that you could pull out. And then the other things that I finished this month are socks. So on my New Zealand auto knitter, I have been cranking some more socks. My lucky husband Regan has got quite a few pairs of socks now, but I hadn't cranked him a pair of socks. I've made all the socks he has, I've made on my flatbed knitting machine. Basically because I didn't have the confidence to change up the pattern that I wrote for my circular sock knitting machine. I didn't feel confident enough to play with those numbers to know what size sock I was going to get. Until this month, I have had a play and I have confidently made a sock that fits his foot. Here we go. There's like maths in how many rows to put in the foot there to make it the right size for his foot and I just wasn't 100% sure of those previously and I'd only mastered it but now I have figured out his numbers, we're good to go. So I cranked a couple of pairs of socks for him. This is the new Opal sock yarn and it has a black ply in there. Opal, I think it's bouquet, bouquet or something like that. Here we go, you can see the black in there real good now. Super fun, I got that from Good Wool Hunting. A couple of skeins of that, of balls, one colourway that I really liked and I'm working on for myself and then I'll obviously crank Regan a pair. Again, I really wanted to use most of this ball of wool for his socks so they're quite nice and long for wearing as work boots. I think I split the Opal ball into two 50 gram little cakes so that when I was cranking I definitely knew I had enough to make my second sock. Yeah, these have the one and one rib on the very very top and then go into the three and one rib down there. There's another pair but I think they're on his feet today so that is good there when you're worn and used. Yeah, my ones, I've only done one, this is the other colourway, what's this one called, something like Flower of Love. Cannot remember exactly but again it's got that black ply in there. Exactly the same kind of pattern as the Regan ones, I've obviously just got different mounting grounds and my foot there so that's my foot. There's only one that I've never framed yet because I am going to start recording some tutorials on how I crank a sock on my sock knitting machine. More and more people I've been talking to have been wanting to learn or I've got a machine and so I'm going to record me making the second one of these socks and probably make them into more bite-sized YouTube tutorials, like one video will probably just have the heel section otherwise it'll be a marathon YouTube video to watch in one and probably for me to upload as well. That's all my finished makes, yeah, lucky Regan, he's stopped wearing his other work boot socks now and only wears the hand-knit socks that I've made, well not hand-knit, they're handmade, for my socks. So what else, Torte Fleece has been happening so I didn't feel like I had done a lot of making because more spinning is happening but I have finished quite a few things, again whenever I show them on here I realise I have done more than I thought. This is some spinning ready to be plied, I just haven't quite decided like originally I was like I'm going to ply these together but now I've got these other two beautiful painted braids and I think one of the plies is going to be this and the other ply will be the beautiful hand-painted braids that I am yet to spin so these are just in holding. You can yeah you can totally see there's a bit of twinkle in there including silver sparkles, this is Anna Gratton's beautiful Corridale and it's a blend that she has made with all those beautiful colours in there and sparkles. It was a dream to spin, I think this blend was called Power so if you're looking for it, yeah try and get some off Anna Gratton, I think it's Power. Back with those, I thought I split it evenly and did 100 grams on each one but this one looks different to this one. And then my other spinning has been spindle spinning, working on a braid that I dyed some time ago, some of you may recognise this one, pretty silk merino. So here we are spindle spinning, super fine, I have plied a skein of it from my spindles, this is three ply, anyway spindle spun three plies because my spindle spinning is so fine, I'm going to use at least three plies to make it a decent amount of it. Yeah happy with that, that's my tortoise fleece effort so far, I've got till the end of this week till the 26th of July tortoise fleece runs too but I think I have got these projects now that I'm inspired and wanting to work on and finish so I'll probably keep on spinning after tortoise fleece and that's all good. Thank you all for joining on the chat too, there's quite a few people on there sharing their beautiful spins, nice to see what everyone else is making and I even love seeing everyone's spinning wheels and things like that. Yeah tortoise fleece, um what else, fibre and yarn club went out, I just realised before I started recording this I haven't even posted the colour pictures on social media, like I haven't done the colourway release for July, so maybe tomorrow I'll make that happen. It was ruby, July's birthstone is ruby, so beautiful ruby red, very vibrant red and while I did put a very vibrant red in the yarn and fibre I also had a little creative play and I ended up with some speckles in there, yeah just so it wasn't a solid solid red. I don't have any to show you, it has all gone to its home and there's no spares this month, yeah so that was fibre club. Um I guess the website hasn't got anything new as such but I have put quite a lot of things on sale including the yarn and the painted braids, I really I have plans for spring and colourways and stitch markers and all that in the pipeline and I really want to clear out the stock to put the new spring stuff in there so go online and grab yourself some some bargains, all the stitch markers even I've done buy one get one free because there's lots of those and again I want to clear them out and move those for some new stuff. Um in the weekend I went to a felting workshop on Saturday at Hanan Gallery in Invercargill, the lovely Louise um has all her amazing felted artwork in there and she does felted scarves as well, very talented lady um but she had a work she hosted a workshop and I went along on Saturday and it was for a felted artwork so I've felted slippers and they are the warmest and most delicious um but to do something slightly more artistic and definitely inspired by Louise's beautiful artworks if you ever get a chance to see those um yeah so I wanted to go and learn some new techniques. It is an almost dry, I might make a reel and put that on my social media too once it's fully dry because how it started off and how it became this is very different and I'd like to show you the whole process. Um this landscape image was inspired by my trip to Alaska to me this is Glacier Bay um there's the glacier and I've needle felted in some sea otters afterwards so there were um quite a bit was no not very much of it was needle felted a lot of this was wet felted like I've got silk fabric in here this was a piece of silk fabric um yarn that green wiggly fluffy bit that was piece of yarn I put in even these stars were like on this mesh kind of so anything you could blow through you could felt in there's some more yarn some chewy stuff kind of mesh and felt it in afterwards I needle felt it in some stilenea some lovely bling a bit of grey highlighting and the um sea otters I needle felt it in afterwards another bit of silk fabric very happy with that I would like to frame it put on the wall Louise has all her stunning felted artwork um framed in like amazing frames but you can also put something on the the back like you put a piece of bamboo or something on there and hang it like that I just wanted to keep it dusty free so there's my needle felting well wet felting my artwork very happy with that and definitely working on it like focusing on the detail in the workshop you could have just kept going and doing a bit more and a bit more of it when I come away and then looked at it later on oh I'm very happy with that yeah it looks better when you're not so up close and focusing on it you come away for a bit and I feel like oh I skipped a section what is on my needles there's again not a lot on my needles because I'm spinning tortoise is happening and I'm spinning so that's what I do when you when I sit down but I do have one thing and this was a skein I shared again while this one was in Canada British Columbia Victoria this is where I got this one and I'm making a musselboro hat so I finished doing the increases and now I'm spinning it around and around for a long time something like 41 centimeters or something and that's where I wish that I could just stick it on my sock machine and crank it but that's not always a race and it's nice to have a plain stockinette project for when I'm out and about and on the go and yeah I don't have to think about it you can knit and chat or I can knit while he's driving or it's good to have a project like this happy with how the colors are coming in I think it's going to color pool like it has pulled green here and pink there but I'm I'm happy with that I like it yeah musselboro hat I also um have plans to make another headband with a flower color work in it um for a family member so maybe I'll have that show next month as well yeah I really enjoy those making those headbands so yeah another one of those is going to be on the needles soon I think apart from that I feel like that's all this week and yeah go have a look on the website see if there's anything there that you want to snap up and help me clear out ready for bringing in some nice fresh springy colors it's going to be quite pastel soft yeah thanks for joining me um please comment below any questions ask away yeah and also I'll link all the patterns and things that I talk about below so you can find out some more information thanks again for watching see you next month