For The Love of Fiber

I have about a million more pictures of the Rose Cottage project, but since this blog is supposedly about fiber arts and travel, I though maybe a little shot of a few things I have been working on lately might be fun.  Not to mention easier than the next 75 steps of the cottage project!

For the love of Bumbles

  I "unvented" a new way to make catnip toys: a needle-felted, scarily realistic, cat-nip rat.

Take a little fiber (washed, but still a little sheep-y seems to intrigue Bumbles better than scoured within an inch of its life fleece) and needle it to make a little mat.

 I forgot to take a picture of the next step where you put some catnip on it and fold the fiber around it.

Then needle it into a basic mousey shape.

Make some whiskers and a tail by braiding yarn scraps together.

Attach the whiskers and tail by needle felting a little more fiber over them.  Detail pointy nose shape.

Add some eyes with little bits of a darker color, and Viola! A pet rat for your beloved cat.

I keep getting a little scare every time I see it on the floor!

For the love of Byron

I love my cat, but I love my brother-in-law, at least as much.  A few years ago I made him a cotton throw, but it was always just a little small for him (though he loves it dearly!). I knew he would appreciate this:

It's based on the Modern Miters Afghan free pattern from LionBrand, and is made with super easy care Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick yarn.  I started it at the end of December managed to finish it in time for it to arrive right on his birthday the day after Valentine's Day. He called me to thank me even before he called his own mother!

For the love of Myself

I dumped all of my knitting notions out, sorted them by type into a gazillion saucers and then reorganized them into various pouches, and even managed to clean up after myself!

Love is all you need!

Summer Time Flies

     No, we haven't been having a fly problem, just the usual problem of time flying by when you're having fun. We decided to stay home this summer and do Oregon things. One of them was supposed to be blogging (in my mind) but this is the first I've gotten to it as I've been having too much fun doing other things. I guess I'll just try to do one thing (or at least theme) at a time so it isn't too arduous to read. By the way, if you haven't seen Seth's website recently, you should check it out. He re-did parts of it, and it has very little reading, mostly pictures.

     

    Of course a huge amount of my time has been devoted to fibery pursuits, so I'll start with

 them. School let out on Wed. June 17th and the Black Sheep Gathering started Fri. 19th. I worked on my room Thursday, then left it in total disarray for the rest of the weekend as I took FIVE classes at BSG this year: Popular Wheel Mechanics (with the utterly amazing Judith MacKenzie-McCuin), making felted pendants (with sweet and talented Lori Flood), spinning greased lightning (mohair) (with the ebullient and exuberant Janis Thompson), spinning exotics (with Queen of the Fiber Bins Laurie Weinsoft), and Tips, Tricks and Techniques (knitting) (with the extremely knowledgeable and helpful Joan Schrouder). I was exhausted, but I learned a TON. 

       

 I  had one afternoon to shop and I used it wisely: buying a Jenkins Turkish drop spindle, a set of new hand cards(I forget the maker--John Day area), some practice wool from Bellwether, a new drive band for my wheel, and a silly book.

I managed to get my rear end back to my classroom for one day on Monday and got things pretty well cleaned up, but I had the summer fiber bug pretty bad by then. I spent the next few days at my friend Dominique's house playing with some white fleeces and dyes. 

We did about 9 batches altogether. Mine are intended to supplement my Hunting Jacket yarn supply because the Ewes (my local spinning group) convinced me that I didn't have enough fiber for a whole jacket. Doe's are basically just her going crazy because she loves to dye.

I also managed to finish a second Noro 2 row scarf and my handspun cardigan that I have been working on for about a year!

I was excited that the one set of buttons 

I had in my button drawer went more than perfectly with it. 

The yarn is a blend of 50%  dyed silk and 50% Lorane (the long dead prize sheep's name from which my mother-in-law gave me her last pound of fleece). I carded it on my old gnarly hand cards and spun it rather unevenly I must admit. I chain plied it to keep the colors from mixing. The plied yarns ranged from a rather decent worsted weight sort of thing to pretty durned bulky. I had to alternate balls every other row to get a half consistent fabric! It was fun though, and I used big #11 needles. I designed it using Barbara Walker's Knitting From the Top. I love how it fits and feels warm, but not too heavy. Next to Elizabeth Zimmermann, Barbara Walker is among my next most cherished knitting authors. Someone told me she's a feminist writer as well! AND she's going to be on the Luminary Panel at the Sock Summit which I will be attending next week.  Like I said, Summer Time Flies.

Procrastinator's Curse

I wish I hadn't gone so long between blog posts, because now I don't have time to tell you about:



getting the sleeves onto my bottom up now-one-piece Bacardi cardi;



making felted beads with my class at school and then with friends at a friend's house;



playing with my in-laws' new puppy Willow (she likes to email);








getting a new futon that came in a box;



traveling to Pittsburgh , PA, from a snowstorm in Portland which lead to us staying overnight at an Embassy Suites with a waterfall/koi pond in Fort Worth (yes, Texas);






shopping in the Strip District (not what you think--it's a strip of warehouses/fun food stores);






spending winter break at my folks' house celebrating solstice, my mom's birthday, Christmas, Channukah, and the folks' 50th wedding anniversary all at once (including sleeping in the attic playroom);










the hats I crocheted for the boys, or the beaded bracelets I knitted for the girls;




the "fun and easy" rat, Liar, my niece created for Seth (Uncle Rat) or the cool Rat-Sack bag from my Uncle Ed's newest business project;








or going to a really cool house on Glenn Creek, just below Golden and Silver Falls state Park, in Coos Bay, Oregon, where we spent New Year's Eve;




To tell you all that would take a whole blog entry for each event, but if you want to know more about any of them, let me know and I'll write some more!

+1-1=16

So, I started and finished a new project all in one day! I went to a great workshop about making felted flowers at a great little local craft/book/high quality natural toys and art called Creative Hands Mercantile. I made this gorgeous flower garland in 3 hours!



In fact I think I might go embellish it a bit with a few beads.....

I didn't used to believe in U.F.O.'s!

It's true. I used to have one or two (maybe three!) fiber projects going at a time. I thought you had to finish them before you could start a new one (I used to think the same thing about books!). Was it a question of duty, or did it simply seem too decadent to indulge more? Whatever it was, it's gone now! Much to my tidy husband's chagrin I'm sure, I started hanging out with a much wider collection of Knitters and Spinners (not to mention reading the Yarn Harlot) during my sabbatical year. One of the many epiphanies I had (O-kay, one of the few, but still, a few epihanies is a heckuvalot better than none!) is that I realized that fiber love, much like familial love, can expand to encompass as many people, I mean projects, as you could ever meet! Now there are U.F.O.'s* flying all over my house.

I think I managed to corral most all of them here. Time to count!

1. Alpaca/Merino/Silk blend. Spun as close to laceweight as I could (first effort ever) using a worsted draw. It's really more like fingering weight. It is intended to become world's largest Elizabeth Zimmermann PI Shawl (which will be my 2nd ever lace project to knit).






     

2.   Supplies for beaded ornaments. I made a bunch last year and hope to make more this year. I should have looked at the pattern company's name, but you can buy a little kit and then reuse the pattern. They're like little socks you slip over a glass ornament. It sounds a bit tacky, but they're really lovely! Really!

3.  Homespun+FunFur+FiberTrends=irresistable  cuteness

4. Random bulky wooly ends for pot holders.

5. Felt pieces for cloak idea

6.  Kumihimo cord braiding is great to stuff in your purse.  You can do really complicated stuff, but I'm totally satisfied with the basic one which is pretty mindless. I got the kits from Carolina Homespun at the Northwest Regional Spinner's Association (NWRSA) conference last spring.

7.  My sister sent me this cool, renewable, fair trade, etc., BANANA fiber yarn. It's pretty thick and stiff in a way, but really silky smoothy. I'm bound and determined to find a way to make it into a new back for a wonderful old tapestry cat pillow I inherited from our grandmother. Suggestions?

8.  I bought this spindle, made by Janis Thompson and her family at Dyelots.  Some of the fiber too. Some of it I dyed (chartreuse and cadet blue), some she did (green multi). It's my first spindle project, so it's a bit on the bulky side and the whole color repeat plied together definitely pushes the spindle to it's capacity limits! I think it will make some fun soft slippers.


9.  Needlepoint bookmark kit I bought at the Tintagel Castle Ruins in Cornwall, England when I ran out of traveling projects. This was of course in the Spring of '05! I really only have about 2 hours left on this. Needlepoint's just not my favorite I guess.

10. My second spindling project. I took a "different ways to use colored roving / different plying techniques class" from Beki Reis-Montgomery at the NWRSA conference last spring.  Too cool. This will make some crazy socks. Although I love Wearing hand-knit socks, I don't really love sock knitting, but I figure that spinning the wool on a spindle will take so long that I'll hardly ever have to knit them!

11.  This is a gorgeous sweater that Seth's mom knit for him eons ago, but which he never wears because it's too warm, that I would love to steek and turn into a super sweater coat cardigan, if I can get my nerve up.....

12.  My friend and NIA teacher and I got together and did some dying of purply wool. The bag of colorful Romney locks was a gift from Rolly Thompson of Fox Hollow Farm after she won it back after donating it in a raffle at NWRSA. I want to try that wrapped yarn technique that was in SpinOff a few issues back.

13. This is the wool for my hunting jacket concept  (maybe E.Z.'s adult surprise jacket?) that I wrote that giant blog about a few weeks ago.

14.  I had better finish this one quick before my dear friend reads this!  We were in the Beehive Wool Shop in Victoria B.C., Canada when I was oohing and ahhing over a shawl made of a really expensive skein of Handmaiden SeaSilk, and my friend slyly said, "You could knit this for a very dear friend."  I couldn't afford the full skein, but a few months later I found a half sized skein at a shop (I can't remember the name, but it was in a lovely historic home) near the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.  Almost done. Even the half sized skein is like a million yards!

15. My wonderful mother in law gave me a gift certificate for one of our LYS's (Soft Horizons) for my birthday last year, because I discovered that though I love to spin wool, I really need cotton cardigans for work. The yarn is O-wool Balance (50% organically grown cotton, 50% organically grown merino wool); the pattern is the Bacardi sweater from No Sheep For You. This one I actually managed to put on my Ravelry site (Laurarose).  Of course I can't leave a pattern alone now that I've read E.Z., and I'm trying to make a yoke top....

16. Homespun Navajo/chain plied wool and silk yarn (I even won a 3rd place ribbon for it at The Black Sheep Gathering (in June '07).  I'm trying top down one piece construction as described in Barbar Walker's classic tome (all her books are tomes!) Knitting From The Top.  

Stash storage all tidied up:

Some "Real" fiber addicts have many more U.F.O.'s than this, but I've seen enough of them to be a true believer. I guess I had better stop blogging and get back to stash busting!

*Un-Finished Objects