3 posts tagged “yarn”
You may have heard of this little site called Ravelry. Got my invite a couple of weeks ago, and OMG I love it. Look for me there as divinebird and ADD ME if you like. :D
Some recent pics of knitting (and crochet!):
And spinning:
WARNING: HIGHLY PIC-HEAVY. If you're on a slow connection, you may want to go fix yourself some lunch or something.
Ok so--I've been so busy that I haven't even taken the time to make a real blog post for most of the month. This should catch you up to what's going on in my world--at least the fibre-enhanced portion thereof. ;)
It started with the arrival of a box from Crown Mountain Farms. I am spinning some of their Sock Hop yarn, so three pounds of it are sitting in my living room right now. :D I plan to do about a pound a week, but the first one went VERRRRRRRRRRY slowly as I was getting used to my new wheels, the fibre, and concentrating on making it to their specifications. Teyani (and everyone else) warned me that spinning for production is a very different mindset than spinning for oneself, and I completely understand it now. I'm about halfway through the box, which is good, but much slower than I'd anticipated. I see myself speeding up a lot in the coming weeks, though, so I should do pretty well with this.
A massive collage of pics I took a couple weeks ago of my first 2 skeins (in colorway Great Balls of Fire):
Here's a couple of collages featuring yarns I've finished. You may recognize the Iris Garden Stripe as the yarn that was on my wheel in the last entry.
My crochet class ended on Wednesday, on a high note. I was thrilled to bits to see everyone making something--even the two who had never done any yarn crafts before! It's so amazingly wonderful to see progress like that. Even the one who was frustrated because she didn't think she'd ever get it was changing colors, experimenting with yarns, and gaining confidence. My work here is done.
About midway through the month, I was struck with an inescapable urge to dye silk. What a success! There's nothing like seeing a brilliantly-colored swath of silk fibre to make one feel like one can do ANYTHING. I used McCormick's food coloring, citric acid, some plastic containers and my microwave, and in one afternoon I had this:
The pink/orange/purple one is spinning up beautifully.
I finished two pairs of the mittens in my 3-pair commission; I got slowed down considerably when I had a few weeks of no knitting at ALL. I worked in the wood shop, babysat, ran errands, did taxes (both personal AND business), cleaned my apartment, did a mountain of laundry, and cleaned out the van & my car. Oh, then I helped my sister pack for moving (she's coming back to CT! YAY!), worked for my dad, and went through a series of doctors' appointments for various small things. I have discovered that I am highly allergic to cats (though mine doesn't bother me symptom-wise), somewhat allergic to dogs and some pollen, and not allergic at all to dust mites or cockroaches. Eww. I...guess that's good?
I got the Babe spinning wheel at this month's Guild meeting, and though I loved its portability and durability, it just wasn't working out. I was kind of disappointed after spending a tidy sum on it, and couldn't figure out why I liked using Debbie's so much but disliked mine. Why was it so difficult to spin?
It turned out to be a combination of things. First, I had used Debbie's on her hardwood floor, whereas I have thick carpeting with double padding. The entire apparatus would wobble when I treadled, meaning it was extra work to keep the wheel going. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the very design of the wheel put it off balance. The maiden juts out unsupported over the treadles (you'll see it in the photos below) and once it starts to move, the only thing keeping it upright is a single pole along the back of the wheel. Think of a flagpole in the wind--it's still upright, but it snaps back & forth at the top. It affected the takeup as well, making it hard to wind the yarn onto the bobbin.
My solution was to add stability to the design by placing a support under the maiden that would attach to the bottom frame between the treadles. I found a piece of cherry (my favorite!) that had a slight warp in it, and therefore was unusable for furniture. It's unnoticeable in this situation, though, so I cut it to length, then cut out the areas for it to surround the frames on each end. I put a small nail into each end, then drilled a tiny hole in position on the frame to correspond with the nails. After adding a decorative cutout and a good sanding, the piece was done. Check it out!
The wobble is gone, and I can even use the support piece as a carry bar. It's like a totally new wheel.
On the shop front, I have seen my sales pick up a bit. Instead of months between sales, it's been a few weeks between each one. This IS an improvement, though far from my goal of a few sales a week. I've got a bunch of new yarns that will be posted in the next week or two; I want to do a few craft fairs over the summer and I'll need stock! I've also got a crochet project in the works for the shop; not sure what it's going to be but the squares have built up throughout my crochet class.
Not sure if you remember the Tiger Lily yarn I spun up from Abby's luscious batts, but I was JUST getting ready to wind it into a ball after the guild meeting so I could start knitting my socks. I was showing the fat skein to one of the lovely ladies of the guild when she gasped and said, "You HAVE to enter that into the skein contest this fall!" I demurred (I really wanted my socks) but when I talked to Abby, she was like, "GO FOR IT." And so I'm gonna re-skein it (it's gotten a bit out of place from being handled so much), tag it, and enter it in pretty much ANY skein contest I can find this summer. :) Why not? It remains my favorite skein to date--and I'm a girl who LOVES all of my yarn. It would be kind of cool to even say I participated, y'know?
Geez, I think that's enough for now. I'm sure there's a ton I've missed, but it will have to wait til later. Enjoy the pics, check out the shop, and drop me a line to let me know someone's reading this! :D
Sorry I haven't posted recently! November is National Novel Writing Month, which means I have been working like crazy on a story that's fallen behind, and on top of that, this is the time of year when I freak out about how many gifts I need to finish by Christmas...not to mention that both of my parents' birthdays are in December. *cries* I have too much to do.
So of course, with all this Stuff to Do, I decided to slack off participate in the "Flash Your Stash" on secretpal_lj3, over on LiveJournal. It took me an hour to photograph the whole stash, which I discovered would NOT fit onto a queen-sized mattress. Not even with stacking. -_-;;
So here we go!
My Spinning Stash, with my 3 spindles, niddy-noddy, 3 bumps of wool from a local CT farm, a lot of my handspun, a bag of washed but uncarded fleece, and a bag of bunny
Debbie Bliss Cashmerino aran & cashmerino chunky, and a few skeins of a knockoff
Assorted chunky plied yarns, some of my chunky handspun, sparkly and shiny yarns, recycled silk, recycled silk & wool...the white mass in the middle is some fingering weight vintage wool.
Worsteds & DKs, plied. Lots of KnitPicks WotA, Cascade 22o, Cascade Eco wool, some vintage teal green wool, two colors of a local co-op's wool (the bright green & yellow on the right), 2 cones of wool, OH and some KnitPicks Ambrosia in the very front & center. :) Also, some laceweight alpaca made it into this pic somehow; I must have been distracted by the cat and put it here by mistake. :)
Cottons, sock yarns, & Superwashes. Superwashes in the upper right, including some Filatura di Crosa and some Mission Falls 1824. Kitchen cottons in the upper right, then moving down to Berber Cotton, then sock yarns...some Mountain Colors Bearfoot, Trekking XXL, Cascade Fixation, some leftover Artyarns Ultramerino 4, then some Nature Cotton, and mercerized cottons on the bottom left.
Single-ply wools. Includes some Tibetan wool on the left, then some Manos del Uruguay and some debbie bliss that matches it exactly, a lot of Reynolds Lopi & Lite-lopi on the right, the multicolor in the front is Farmhouse Yarns (local spinner), 2 skeins of Brown Sheep Co. Lamb's Pride in purple, and last some assorted yarns from old projects.
Fuzzy and shiny yarns. Starting in upper left, a metric tonne of a kid mohair/acrylic blend that I got online, some acrylic thick & thin that makes amazing scarves, 1 skein of Berroco Sizzle, several skeins of Bernat Boa and some Splash that looks like lettuce, 4 skeins (well, 2, but the socks take up the other 2) of Reynolds Devotion, an angora/nylon blend that makes awesome socks, a few balls of mohair, some Plymouth baby alpaca, a few Target yarns, some mohair/nylon blend called "college", and the single green skein on the left is what's left over from my husband's alpaca socks.
Eleanor (from the book Scarf Style) in progress, with 3 balls of the yarn being used, plus 1 of the same yarn in a different colorway. The yellow is called 'citrus' and is dyed locally by my favorite LYS owner. She dyed the yarn for Eleanor specifically for me; it's called 'citrus grove' because it uses the same colors but in different amounts. I have 2 more skeins of this on hold for me at the shop...I'm buying it one at a time. :)
...And that, my dears, is what obsession looks like.
This week is killing me. I will have pics of the finished bad-ass bag once I recover from finishing an art commission AND a knitting commission that's almost done. XD
Anything in the stash that you have suggestions for me to knit? I'm open. I need to add some new items to the Shop. :D
