We left home on Saturday, specifically so we could travel up the A1 and cross on the A66 with the least number of lorries! Sunday, we have found is a good day to travel this, potentially the busiest part of the journey. Today was no different, we got away fairly early and it was quiet, not by Norfolk standards but for this part of the journey. We stopped at Wetherby Services, busy with coaches of sports teams but so good to see so many youngsters taking part in sports. Pret was our chosen brand here, a wide choice of savoury snacks and so much better than the Costa offering yesterday. The coffee was good too.
We then drove on and along the A66, the weather was good and good weather and little traffic made this very enjoyable as the views are superb. There are few decent stops along the road and the ones that are there, tend to get blocked up with people out for a Sunday lunch. We suffered nightmare parking, I guess inconsiderate is a more accurate term, last year at Mainsgill Farm Shop. We drove across to Reged which now has plenty of decent parking. It was hot and sunny and we made our own lunch and enjoyed what still seemed to be summer.
From here it was a relatively short journey up the M6. This was quiet and past experience tells us it gets quieter from now on. Our chosen stop is a Hoddam Castle, near Ecclefechan. It is far enough from the route to hear no traffic, a very spacious camping site and we planned to spend the next day there doing no driving. I was, and still am, finding brightness a problem especially when outside. This seems to be a side effect of having the cataract operations earlier in the year and now being able to see so much better! So I was very much looking forward to a rest day where I would have greater control of the light! (1)
I spent the following day doing lots of textile related things. I had got my digital microscope with me and brought a skein I had spun quickly from a hand dyed silk hankie. At the time I just wanted to know that fibre I knew was silk was taking up the natural dye. (2) now I had time to look at the spinning, measure the diameter of the yarn I had spun and take a look at the individual silk fibres.
Individual silk fibres about x 200 - notice all the fibres have some colour. Being silk there is quite a bit of reflection fr9m the light in the microscope.
I had the microscope with me as I was going to use it to look at some fine yarn spun by some Shetland friends, more later.
The weather on the rest day was good, during the late afternoon I went around grounds with my camera, tripod and newly acquired grey card which I hoped would help me get a better colour representation in a photo of yarns which I have dyed. (3)
Hoddam Castle, some photos. I just love the texture of the tree bark.
It had been a great rest day and we had one more overnight stop planned before we got the ferry on the 6th in Aberdeen to go to Shetland.
Notes
- If you get told you need a cataract operation don’t worry about it! It is painless and to me the worst part was the month after each operation when there was a huge long list of things I could not do, including gardening! I was fortunate to have the second one done about a couple of months after the first one. The time between was tricky, one ‘new’ eye and one old one! The old one saw red as a very warm red and the new one was much bluer in tone! Now I am aware that people will see colours differently! I am very fair skinned and this has probably not helped with my sensitivity and at times pain, due to my new found brightness. The up side is I don’t think I have seen this well since I was about 15!
- Some time ago, I was wanting to dye some wool and silk and bought some merino and silk from a yarn supplier, only to find that the ‘silk’ did not take up the natural dye. I needed to reassure myself that silk did actually take up my natural dye. Reassured but I now know if I definitely want silk yarn the best way is to spin it myself!
- Digital cameras ‘see’ objects differently from our eyes. Hence we can get disappointed about the colours when we upload a photo, and even more so when we print one. There are various ways of ‘correcting’ for this when doing a lot of digital photography. Using a grey card is one of them. Since then I have used it to get better colour representation but have gone back to my old notes from when I did Digital Photography with Alsager U3A! I am now using a combination of methods. This was one of the results of knitting the grey yoked jumper with the cochineal/indigo dyed yarns …. I had to refresh my memory of, or rather relearn, how to do this.
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