Knitting :: Cowl For A Friend

Last November I spun and knit this cowl in a matter of days. The fact that it was on drop spindle is what amazes me for bulky weights on a spindle are not my forte. I should say Single bulky weight. But it turned out very nicely and I do believe my friend was quite pleased with her cowl. It was a birthday present and since I spun and knit it quickly I did not keep proper notes and write down the pattern like I should have.*Ehem. Cough.

One of these days I will spin up more bulky yarn and write out the pattern for all of you. I'll keep you posted if/when that happens.

January Fiber Updates

 Hello my friends! It is good to be back here in blogland with you. I will admit I have been spending more time on Instagram then on my blog. Probably because the camera on my phone is nicer then my point-and-shoot. And it is fairly instant, far less work then editing photos and doing up a blog post. But I am determined to be a little more regular on here, as time allows, and not neglect my poor blog and my wonderful followers. 
 First up are shop updates. 
I am keeping fairly busy with my shop. Things slowed down around Christmas but are picking back up within the last week. Spindle sales are on the rise and that is a blessing. I get so excited every time I sell a spindle. Actually I still get so excited every time I have any sort of sale. Each one is a blessing and an answer to prayer.
Newest in my shop right now are my Marbled Puni Collections! 
I am working on carefully carding up unique fiber blends on my hand cards and selling them in small amounts. These are similar to batts, but are already split up into sections as you can spin straight from a puni. They will make beautiful heathered yarns and depending on the content, will be lightly textured.
If you haven't seen them yet please do stop by and check them out!
** Concerning Punis, I will be doing a special post about what makes a puni, and the difference between punis and rolags. Stay tuned!

 In my own personal non-business-related Fibery dealings, this is a little of what I have been working on. Bright and early New Year's day, (yes, I mean about 12:30am!) I dumped out my container of woolly odds and ends left over from other carding projects. I wanted to see if I could make some order out of the chaos and maybe card them into rolags/punis. Yes, I know I could use them for felting or stuffing, but they seemed to pretty to use for anything other then spinning. I lashed them neatly onto my hand cards as shown above, then away I carded.

 As you can see they turned out beautifully! They have some short,, blobby spots. And I had to deal with a few more noily sections then I usually do, but overall I loved them. Since I was using scraps they ended up being a mixture of merino wool, angora, silk, bamboo, llama, and sari silk threads. 
 This was my project basket on New Year's Day. Although I ended up just working on my scrappy punis and never did get to spin on my Christmas yarn. I carded, spun, and plied all of my scraps on January 1st, in between the general chatter, food, games and time spent with my wonderful family. 

 Here is the resulting yarn, my first handspun of the year 2013!I am not sure on the WPI of the yardage, I will have to measure it again.

 As for my Happy Christmas yarn, it spun up fairly quickly. I dithered back and forth on how I should ply it. Two ply to blend the colors more? Navajo ply for longer color repeats? Normally I don't have trouble deciding what to do with my plying but I wanted this to be perfect so it sat as a single for a little while. Two different people advised that I do two-ply. So that is what i ended up going with.

And I absolutely LOVE the way the colors ended up! It is a very unique yarn, and some of the colors are not "me" at all. But as a whole I love it and I am already designing a shawl pattern with it. This was only 180 yards of fingering weight yarn. I have already knit almost all of it and I am plying the second skein for it. Depending on how the shawl turns out I may turn it into a pdf for sale on Ravelry. I'll be sharing pictures with you soon!
What about you? What projects have been keeping you busy in your spare time thus far in the New Year? I would love to hear all about them!

This Week's Projects

This week I started a new and quick spinning project. I carded together two of my colorways, "CHESTNUT" and then a small blue and green braid from one of my samplers. I also added a little bit of angora to the mix. The resulting yarn is a heavy worsted, almost bulky in parts. I have a gift in mind for it. We'll see. I only carded about half of it. So this is roughly two ounces.  I love carding together special combinations of fiber to spin. They always come out so unique and beautiful.

I'm also doing some crocheting. I ordered this yarn during Knit Picks Cyber Monday sale for a gift I am making. I haven't done any crocheting in quite awhile. I can certainly tell because after only two evenings of steady crocheting this past weekend, my wrist was cracking constantly while I was crocheting! However this pattern goes fairly fast so I am hoping it is done soon. I prefer to knit.
Speaking of gift-making, Christmas is fast approaching!  I still feel like I have so much to do! How about you? Are you working on any projects for your friends and loved ones?

Just popping in.

Today it is raining again. And I am not complaining. It is wonderful to have all this rain after our long dry spell. It feels a bit like autumn, like it did when I blogged this post. The house is quiet, so quiet that you can hear the clocks ticking, and the rain hitting the stove pipe outside the living room wall. 

Rainy weather always puts me in the mood for tea. I turned the electric kettle on, fished out my tea pot, wiped the dust out of a cup I have not used in awhile and made a pot of Rooibush Chocolate Tea. It is made by the Tea Gschwendner company, and oh so tasty. As the description says: "The creamy sweetness of chocolate combined with refreshing mind blend perfectly for a delightful cup!"

Things are going to be different around home for awhile. Grandma had surgery and Mother and I are switching on and off taking turns caring for her. The last two days I had previous commitments, and getting back earlier then planned, I had intended to dye fiber today  The rain put a stop to that and I found myself home this afternoon, with less to do then I thought.

So today I am working on my Etsy shop, blog and some knitting. Last week I picked up this lovely skein of Ella rae merino lace yarn. It is kettle dyed in gorgeous shades and I was so excited to start knitting it up.

I picked this yarn with my Seaweed Stole in mind, so as soon as I had found the right size of needles I got right to it. This is an easier pattern to work on then the other lace one I was doing. It works well for when I am sitting with my Grandma while we watch the Olympics. I kept losing my place in the other one, staring at the telly and holding my breath until a critical moment in the games had passed. Needless to say, I was not getting anywhere fast on that project! 
The Seaweed stole only has 4 rows to repeat, and just one of them is lace, so it is easy to keep track of while other things are going on.
I'm planning on selling this in my shop once it is done. Though that may not be for awhile, it needs another skein of yarn and the shop where I purchased it is across the state. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!

Of Coffee, Rain, & Spinning.

Having a snack while I blog. Coffee and cookies. Or biscuits, as they are referred to in the UK (and probably other places as well). 

 It is raining here. Hard. A good steady, pouring sort of rain. It is beating down on the metal roof and creating quite a cozy sound and feel in the house. We are having a bit of thunder and lightening as well. I do so love a good thunderstorm! We have needed rain desperately. I am not home this week, but thankfully it is raining at home as well. I was so glad to hear that. It will be interesting to see if anything looks different when I get back. When I left everything was parched dry, and brown as can be. Even the trees looked dry and thirsty.

 This week I finished spinning and plied both of these singles. Not together, they are separate skeins of yarn. 

 Here they are hanging to dry. A friend gave me some flip flops from Old Navy and I save the plastic piece that held them together. I thought it would work perfectly for drying yarn. And it did! Originally I set this yarn over the fence to dry. But the evening sun was low in the sky and soon moved, leaving the yarn in the shade. I ended up hanging the skeins from a branch in the mulberry tree. It worked like a dream. 

The completed yarn is a gorgeous 3-ply. I intend to keep this one for myself! It has such a nice feel to it. I love the way a three ply feels and knits up! I navajo plied my single to get this three ply yarn.

My lace design is coming along beautifully. It slowed a little since I have been gone this week. I am hoping to add an inch or two tonight when I am relaxing. It is such a fun pattern to work on, just enough lace to keep you occupied, but not such a complex pattern so that it makes your head hurt after staring at the chart for awhile. If my design progresses at all while I am here, I'll share another picture with you. For now, I shall close and go enjoy this lovely storm!

Let's Start With The Spinning

 I've been spinning up quite a bit of the fiber that I got at the fiber festival.This one is from the sample bag of fiber that I purchased. I sorted out a some of the roving into colours that looked well together and spun it up into this yarn. I have two skeins that come to an approximate total 160 yards. It was a fun yarn to spin as it was comprised of a variety of wools and I had to use different spinning techniques depending on what color I was  doing. I spun it on one of my older top-whorl drop spindles. It is a little bit heavier in weight, but that works very well with a thicker yarn such as this. After spinning I wound off into a center-pull ball and plied the two ends together. It ended up a nicely variegated yarn that should gently stripe when knit up.

 The romney I carded spins up into an absolutely lovely yarn! It has a very sturdy hand to it, I love the way it feels. The romney has an amazing sheen to it as well, almost like it has silk in it. I am so excited to see how this yarn knits up, but I plan on waiting until I get it all carded and spun before I start knitting. I'm enjoying the carding process though, not to mention I have quite a few Christmas projects in process right now, so it might be awhile before this yarn becomes a stole.

 This summer I was given a pound and a half of cream and a pound of grey-black Huacaya alpaca fiber. It was unwashed and a couple years old so I wanted to get it cleaned up yet this summer. I was visiting a friend and she kindly helped me wash up about 3/4 pound of my cream alpaca. We used mesh bags like before only we had twice as many so we were able to wash up the rest of our wool and also the afore mentioned alpaca. The alpaca fiber was quite dirty and dusty, but there was very little veggie matter and since alpaca fiber lacks the lanolin of wool it was much easier to skirt and prep for washing. The above photo is of the alpaca fiber when it was wet and the photo below is after it dried and fluffed up. What a difference, eh?

 I'm trying to get some w.i.p. done and off the needles. These are my Pavo socks, first blogged about here. I'm further than this photo shows. I just finished the gusset and now am at the heel turning. I don't like the bind off that this sock uses, it is to loose and floppy, so I'm going to just do a standard bind off. I would love to be able have a large stash of hand knit socks for this winter. I need to learn how to do two-at-a-time socks as I am rather bad about finishing the second sock.

And lastly, I'll leave you with some hand-painted yarn worked up in a new design. I'm excited to do a photo shoot and show you just what this is!

Summertime

 Greetings! I'm glad to be back with you. I thought we would start with a garden update before plunging into all the knitting and fiber. I've been gone the last few days so when I went outside to take pictures for my blog I also looked at the garden and snapped a few photos.

This year I planted lots of flowers from seed. Though they did not come up as I would have liked, we still have quite an abundance of flowers that are just beginning to bloom. The zinnias were one of the first flowers to bloom. Zinnias are such a sturdy, cut flower. I like to plant scads of them if at all possible, to use for bouquets and such all summer long.

 The garden is doing well. We didn't plant as great a variety this year as we did last year. But what we do have is doing well indeed. We have 12 butternut squash plants and they are simply loaded with tiny squash! We love to make squash soup in the cold months, and having a good supply of squash on hand will be wonderful. When autumn rolls around I'll have to remember to post our squash soup recipe for you.

 Our tomatoes are flourishing nicely, though they are all still green. We got the garden in later then expected and it is slightly behind. Last year we tried fried green tomatoes and they were surprisingly delicious. 

The soybeans in the field next to us are growing so high, and they are now blooming.

I prefer to have soybeans next to us as opposed to the corn fields. We are not so boxed in with the soybeans.

That is it on the garden update. Now on to fiber!

I've been doing a bit of lace knitting this week. Right now I am in the midst of figuring out a new shawl design. It is past the "frog-it-and-scrap-the-whole-project" stage, which makes me happy. I'm fairly certain that I am on the proper track with this pattern right now. I'm still debating on what to do with the edging though.

Because of my shoulder injury, plying still gives me some grief, though spinning is not as difficult. So my plying projects are piling up right now. The yarn in the back of this picture is all ready to knit with. The two balls in the front still need to be plied. I'll just take my time and do a little here and a little there until they are done. My problem is once I start plying I want to keep at it until the skein is complete.

This single is ready to be wound off into a center-pull ball so I can ply it later. This yarn is part of 5 ounces of alpaca seconds that I purchased at a local alpaca farm earlier this summer. I washed the locks and am working on carding them up a little at a time. I'm considering making a cowl or perhaps another helix scarf out of this yarn.

Speaking of the Helix, here are some updated photos of the my Chocolate Mint Helix!

Currently I've used up all the yarn I had spun for this project. So now I am spinning up my last two ounces as fast as I can because I really want to finish this project. The Helix is such an easy project! It is a repeat of 3 rows the whole time, so it is easily memorized and perfect for take-along knitting. I've been putting it in my purse and taking it to church to work on between services.

I hope you all are having a lovely summer! What projects are you working on? What do you like to knit for easy take-along projects during all the busy summer goings-on? I'd love to hear what you are doing!

Have a blessed day!