Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Cleaned up my room!

My yarn and fiber stash were insanely disorganized until yesterday. I went from this horrible idea, which had yarn, knitting needles, and spinning wheel bits in the top box and fiber in the bottom box.





To this awesome new system!



Bottom two boxes are all fiber, top box is yarn! Much neater and less likely to get dusty. 



I also took the time to bag and label all of my hand spun yarn :)

Thursday, January 26, 2012

My Favorite Roommate

While on my long time away from this blog I got a new roommate, her name is Chell


The guy who lives upstairs in my apartment building found her in a dumpster some time in June, and so I took her home. After a few weeks of trying to find her owner we decided it was time to get her tags and a microchip and call her ours. Unfortunately, my little Chell needed a few medical procedures and they turned out to be quite expensive. About $1,700 later we had a (reasonably) healthy little old lady kitty. She's still got allergies that are causing sores on her lip but we're working on handling that. We have no idea how old she is and she still only weighs 6.5 lbs no matter how much I feed her.

She is the sweetest little cat I've ever encountered and she absolutely loves snuggles, sleeping under piles of soft things and watching me spin yarn. I'm so glad she's part of my life, and I hope she has many more healthy years left in her. :)


And now on to the knitting!

I've been making mittens from the made to order mittens pattern. They're being knit from the pink and gray yarn I posted earlier this month. They're coming out a little big but I think they're pretty, I'm about half way through my first mitten. I'm a terribly slow knitter
 




and here's one last pic of Chell because why not

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

My Boyfriend is Wonderful

Just a quick little post, my boyfriend bought me BFL & silk (75%/25%) batts from The Cupcake Fiber Co . They are absolutely the softest most smooshy and fluffy batts I've ever had! I LOVE them! They're a little expensive but IMO they're worth the price if you're in the mood to splurge and spoil yourself. I can't wait to finish it :)





Sorry, my phone is being mean and won't let me take a nice picture of the yarn



It's going to be a light lace weight yarn, I'll be keeping the colors separate by spinning this on two bobbins, each getting one of each color batt (light to med to dark) and then I'll be plying the two bobbins together.

I've never been a huge fan of green but I love these batts, I see a shawl in their future...

Monday, January 23, 2012

I finished my Orange Yarn!

A long long time ago I bought a little sampler pack of falkland roving, with 0.5oz each of a few super bright colors. At the time I must have had some plan for it but the roving sat in my stash for months. Eventually, I decided to start spinning some of it on my Jenkins Lark, which is the SLOWEST way I have of making yarn. The problem is, I didn't really like the color of this roving... so I don't know what I was thinking when I started spinning it on my lark. It spent months on my lark getting ignored until finally this weekend I spun during my entire 6 hour Saturday DnD session and it's done! Now that it's finished it's actually quite pretty but I have no clue what to do with it.

100 yards at 0.4oz, I'm calling it Crush Soda







I have a bad feeling that because of a lack of other ideas (and good lark roving) I'll end up spinning another little neon roving strip from that pack on my lark, and I'll probably complain the whole time.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

woo I'm back

I missed this blog, and so I'm going to start off with a giant post about what I've been up to over Christmas break and this semester :)

I got a new Jenkins spindle from my awesome mom. This one is a standard sized spindle and it's sooo much bigger than my lark that it felt awkward at first.


I broke it in with an ounce of 50% baby camel 50% tussah silk. This may not be the prettiest yarn I've ever spun but it's definitely the softest! (80 yards, 1.0oz)



I also bought a little tiny niddy noddy at a local yarn shop



Over the break I finally spun my 20% milk protein 80% merino wool that has been sitting around as rolags for a long long time (3.1oz, 172 yards)






I also tried a new technique I've never done before, spinning thick and thin. It's kind of tricky but I had fun making this yarn! Super soft 19.5 micron merino wool (4.45oz 146 yards)




And finally I'm working on yarn to make myself a scarf and maybe matching gloves, this is only one of the two skeins but it's the prettier picture. So far I've spun up a little over half of the 11 oz I have of this 15% tussah silk 85% BFL roving. (6.0oz 280 yards)


So that's it for now, hopefully I'll be updating more regularly these days :p