Favourite daughter of Zeus, Athena was born from Zeus forehead (you just have to go with the stories about the gods... they made sense to the people of the time, and who are we to judge!). She's the goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicraft, specially weaving. 

Forever associated with the city of Athens, she won the right for patronage of the city over Poseidon by creating the first olive tree.She's also the patron goddess of heroic endeavour, helping Heracles, Jason, Perseus and Bellerophon. She also assists the Greeks in the Trojan Wars and acts as divine counsellor to Odysseus. 

This image from  480-470 BC showing Athena observing as the  Colchian dragon disgorges the hero Jason.

In the fable of Arachne Athena shows herself to have a temper just as volatile as her father Zeus. ////arachne was the daughter of a famous dyer of Tyrian Purple, and was a weaving student of Athena. She became so conceited that she claimed her skill was greater than that of the goddess. Athena disguised herself as an old woman, and warned Arachne not to offend the deities, but determined to prove her skill she insisted on a weaving content. 
Athena's tapestry showed her victory over Poseidon for the patronage of Athens, and the 12 Olympian Gods and their victories over mythological figures who challenged their authority. Arachne's showed all the episodes if the deities infidelity and the unfair behaviour of the gods towards mortals. 
In a taper Athena destroyed Arachne's tapestry and loom, and struck Arachne with her staff. Arachne hung herself in despair, but taking pity on her Athena bought her back to life in the form of a spider. 

This is the limited edition shade of Superfine Merino & Silk for today. You can find it in the online shop until stocks run out, and as always it forms part of the Buy 2 Get a third half price offer available on this fibre blend. I am happy to combine orders, but will need you to add a note when you purchase each day. I usually have a lot of orders to process on the first day back and without a note it's highly likely I will miss that you have multiple orders. 

We'll start at the beginning with this years 12 Days of Christmas, for which our theme was Christmas on Mount Olympus. Zeus is the King of the Gods so he'd better go first... given his reputation not putting him first would be a very foolish mistake. 

If you fancy a read along or a listen along as you spin then I can recommend Mythos by Stephen Fry. This will give you more of the origins of the Olympians, and their complicated lives! 
But in short, Zeus is the offspring of Cronus and Rhea who were Titans, and themselves the offspring of Uranus (Father Sky, and Gaia (Mother Earth). As we go through the days you'll realise that being related is utterly inconsequential when it comes to having offspring with each other. Cronus deposed Uranus, but fearing the same fate from his own children ate  Demeter, Hestia, Hiram Hades and Poseidon. Zeus was the youngest child, and his mother came up with a plot to keep him safe, Rhea handed Cronus a swaddled rock instead of the newborn Zeus, and then hid him throughout his childhood. Once full grown Zeus makes Cronus disgorge his siblings, and the Cyclopes, who give him his famous thunderbolt. Together with his siblings and many other allies Zeus goes on to fight in a war with the Titans which he eventually wins. 

After this most of Zeus time is spent having multiple wives, and seducing nymphs, dryads and metal women. All while trying to avoid the wrath of his principle wife Hera. In total he has seven wives, Athena is born to Metis, and Oceania nymph and daughter of Titans. With his sister Demeter he has a daughter; Persephone. With Leto, another daughter of Titands, he has twins, Artemis and Apollo. With his sister Hera he has Ares, Hebe, Eileithiya, and Hephaestus. 
When seducing mortal women he was fond of disguising himself as various animals and birds, often to try and evade the jealousy of Hera, who usually found out anyway and unable to punish Zeus took out her feelings on the mortal woman... more of that later!

The fibre today is a hand dyed braids of Superfine Merino, Camel and Peduncle Silk. Inspired by the lightning bolts that were Zeus's weapon of choice! There's a few spare braids in the online shop, and if you fall in love with the base there's also some other colourways available. I only stock this base for the 12 Days of Christmas, so stocks are limited and won't be back until next year. 

That big thing I hinted in the last time I posted… I can now share!
Firstly and the most important thing, Hilltop Cloud is not going anywhere, I am still dyeing fibre, selling fibre, and nothing about the way you interact with Hilltop Cloud as a customer will change.
That being said, new adventures and challenges are always good, and this has been all those things, I’ve had to go back to school; watch lectures, makes notes, pass tests, do homework, research and write assignments and learn new skills. It wasn’t a challenge I particularly looked for, just one of those little life twists that take you to interesting places. I’m doing small amounts of part time teaching at the training school where I have done lots of work with Nellie. In a former life I was a secondary science teacher so it’s been exciting to tap back in to those skills and return to lesson planning and adapting those plans to work with what’s in front of me.

Dog training in the UK is completely un-regulated, anyone can call themselves a dog trainer. I’ve qualified via an extensive course with the Professional Association of Canine Trainers, which will mean I can be listed on the list of Animal Training Instructors held by the Animal Behaviour and Training Council, this is the only list of trainers recommended by the RSPCA, Blue Cross and The Dogs Trust. They are also working to lobby government to better regulate the industry, and outlaw training practices and tools that cause pain and suffering to dogs such as shock collars.

Meanwhile in Hilltop Cloud land it’s nearly 12 Days of Christmas time, the fibre is here, bags are printed, and they’ll be available very shortly. Signup to the email newsletter to get first notification of availability!

My feet barely seem to have touched the ground since April... a few things that I can't talk about yet, but also lots of lovely things that I can. 

Almost as soon as we got home from Wonderwool we were heading north, north and north some more to go to the Isle of Harris. It was beautiful, and a much needed change of pace. 

Nellie and I have been on the road testing out our sniffing skills at lots of new venues. She's gained in confidence and I've loved learning about how to train her, and use my brain to get the best out of her natural ability. I've even now qualified as a judge for the early levels of The National Nosework Association, so I get to help teams progress along a journey that has bought me so much pleasure over the past year. We've searched farms, schools, museums and even a dis-used prison. 

There has of course been Tour de Fleece, and a community of spinners came together again over in The Fellowship of Yarn  to celebrate our love of making yarn and enjoying learning more about the French countryside and history. I managed a bit of spinning using the leftovers from this years limited edition fibre, but spare time to spin was a little bit lacking this year. I'm currently ploughing through a Bowmont fleece which I've had for years, and really do need to turn it in to yarn, or it needs to go and be rehired, because I want the storage space back!
​I've also been mentoring people for the Association of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Foundation certificate, which has also taken up a chunk of my time this spring and summer.

We also said goodbye to Meg this summer. Our beautiful girl lived a full and happy life, after being adopted at a year old, she spent 14 years in the Welsh countryside. We miss her, but remember the happy times more. 

I'm finally managing to catch up with all the little things 'd been putting off for months, though very soon I'll be back to being busy getting ready for this years 12 Days of Christmas. 

By popular request!
A couple of years ago, when we were all stuck at home I hosted quite a few live online workshops, and recorded them so people could watch them back later. Since then there have been quite a few people who missed the original sessions ask about making the recordings available. 

The oldest of these is Silk Spinning. I've taken the recorded videos and added in lots more information and photos. 
Lots of it has appeared in various forms over the past few years, but this is the first time I've collected everything together in one place. 
The videos are recordings of Zoom sessions, so aren't broken up in to short chunks, not the best quality, and the auto-captions are uncorrected. 
However, I think they're still useful! 
The whole course is just £5, in reflection of all of these things, and you have the chance to leave comments and ask further questions. The first text only lesson is a free-preview so you can check it out before handing over the price of a cup off coffee and piece of cake!

Non-Wool fibres and British wool breeds are on the way, I'm adding them as I get spare chunks of time to put everything in to a logical order. 

​Grug (remember the u sound is more like an elongated i), is cymraeg for heather, this beautiful plant flowers in late autumn (though maybe not quite as late as this month, but I suspect the calendars creators were struggling a little with plant names at this point in the year!)

Our final colour, and if I know anything about all your colour choices I have a feeling this one might be favourite shade for many of you! You can find it in the online shop until stocks run out. 
Our Calendar finished today, the 12 Days of Christmas comes to and end. Traditionally this would mark the end of the festivities over the darkest days of winter. Tomorrow was St Distaff's day, the traditional restart of work for women, when they would go back to their distaffs and their spinning wheels and recommence the never ending work of spinning yarn to weave cloth.

23 Brumaire was the day of Madder, late autumn is often a good time to harvest and replant this to get maximum red colour from the roots, which have had a full summer to grow fat and full of red dye. 
Gweirddrud is actually a word that means mad or wild, it's also known as Cochwraidd or the a welsh version of the name in English; Madr or Madyr. Coch is red in welsh, the name giving a hint to the colour hidden in the roots!

We've got a felling of mists drifting through conifer woodlands for todays colour, and as ever it's in the shop.

I wrote the first set of instructions for this back in 2020 when I first started selling hand dyed warps. Since then I've changed the winding method to use multiple ends, as this is much more time efficient, but it does mean some of the photos on the old version are slightly out of date. In essence it's the same method however!

Most of us who started out with rigid heddle looms have probably only ever used the direct method of warping, but it's just as simple to put a pre-wound warp on your loom. There are lots of resources on the internet, a few You Tube videos, but not very much by way of step-by-step photo tutorials, which is my favourite way to learn because it makes it very easy to follow the instructions as you work, without trying to pause a video, or wish it would get to the point, or go a bit more slowly. 
This is my method, it's largely the same as the one in Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom.

Once you've opened up your loops slide in a stick, one on each side of the cross. Then attach your sticks together in some way. You can drill a hole through your sticks/dowel and thread through some string, but a loosely wrapped elastic band also works, though you do need to leave enough space between the sticks for the yarn to slide. 
Only once you have done this can you remove the ties. Be careful... you only want to cut through the ties and not the strands on your warp. ​

Start to spread your warp out on your lease sticks, and work out where you need to start threading your heddle in order to wind your warp on in the centre of your loom. To do this check how many ends your warp has, and divide it by 4, we'll call this number X. Fid the centre of your heddle, and count along X slots. This is where you will start threading your warp through the heddle. 
The exact method of the next step will now depend on the type of loom you own. If your loom has a removable apron rod (the piece of dowel held in place with texslov cord that you warp your yarn around when direct warping) the next step is simple. 
If you have a loom with a fixed apron rod (eg Ashford looms), you can either modify your loom to make it removable, or will have to cut the loops open and tie your warp in place on the back beam just as you would normally do on the front beam. This last method will increase your loom waste, and will require care if you want to keep your colours in your warp aligned. 
To modify your loom you'll need to remove the plastic rods holding the rod in place, and replace them with texsolv cord.

Keep going across the whole loom, threading loops in order, making sure not to miss out any slots. Sliding loops on to the back beam as you work, adding in the lops to hold the back beam in place as you work along.

Because these threads were wound in groups there may be places where they're a bit stuck together. Don't force them, just stop, and ease the threads apart. It can be a bit fiddly but it's still much quicker than walking backwards and forwards to direct warp! Keep the threads under tension as you warp and that helps. Stickier wool warps will be more fuzzy than silk warps so won't slide past each other so easily, but with patience the whole thing will wind on smoothly. 

You can then cut open the loops and thread one end from each slot in to a hole. 

Tie on to the front apron bar and you're ready to weave!

Ever important to the French, this month of Vintage... the wine harvest!
This month starts on the 22nd September, and ends on the 21st October, and then at the end of the month were 5 days of holiday, otherwise this carefully designed agricultural calendar, with perfect 30 day months would quickly fall out of sync with the realities of the seasons! These were known as Sansculottides or complementary days, on leap years there would be an extra day of holiday.

Today is another day when trilingual translations have gone awry... Belle de Nuit, the name of the day is not Belladonna, also known as nightshade. Belle de Nuit is the french name for Mirabilis jalapa,  also known as The Marvel of Peru or Four o'clock flower, a beautifully fragrant plant whose flowers open in the early evening. 
As for the welsh? Who knows where that came from though marwol does mean deadly. The actually welsh for belladonna is codwarth.... let's move on and simply enjoy the picture!

The colour for today had to be inspired by grapes... and we all love a rich purple! Find the limited edition in the shop.

In Cymraeg hazel is cyll and is sometimes also called collen... remember that double ll isn't the same sound it makes in english. Hazelnuts are everywhere where I live, and as a result we find hazel trees popping up everywhere because the mice bury them as winter stores. You can tell what sort of small rodent ate them by the shape of the hole in the shell. 
Common dormice leave a smooth, round hole in the side of the nut, with teeth marks running around the inside of the hole. This marking is so unique that it’s a method used for surveying presence of dormice in woods.
Wood mice leave teeth marks on the surface of the nut and across the edge of the hole. The hole may be either circular or ragged in shape.
Bank voles create a round hole but the teeth marks are across the edge of the shell, not on the surface. This can take them up to 20 minutes!

Todays Merino & Silk colour is this super vibrant pink, and this colourway is in the shop now.