I hope you all had as quiet and restful a New Years Eve as I had. To my great surprise, when I walked the dog this morning there was not a scrap of graffiti to be seen! I presume the departure of the last child at the relevant house means they do things in a more stately manner these days (though there were still a few revved engines earlier in the evening.

Today was spent in the History Room and was surprisingly busy. Nevertheless I managed to get some knitting done - I have started another beanie using the Corriedale wool I spun.

 It was a little grubby once finished as I spun it in the grease, so I gave it a light washing to get rid of some of the grime but not remove the grease and committed the cardinal sin of drying it on the line in the sun. I has a wonderful lustre and seems rather soft.

Today I wound the skein into two rather large balls (matchbox for scale).

It is knitting up as approximately 8 ply which means I can knit the beanie in the blog off to the right. The one called Doulton. Apart from the struggle dealing with short double-ended set of needles it is coming along nicely. I will show you when it is finished.

The person who gave me the merino wool dropped in today with another entire fleece she has had kicking around for years. I have only looked at what is on top and that is rather too short to do much with. Not merino or corriedale. I will do some investigating to see what it is, possibly suffolk or a cross bred with some non-merino in it (the staples visible are shaggy at the ends rather than blunt like the other breeds mentioned - though that may simply be the part of the sheep they came from as they are rather dirty and may be belly wool).

There was another flood at the history room, coming in at exactly the same points we thought we had sealed. But on investigation it turned out someone had put on a sprinkler that was running down the wall behind the protective barriers, so a note has been left to suggest a little more restraint with sprinklers in future.

Have a great and wonderful 2017 - it has to be better than last year!!