Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Fiesta FO

Last September I fell in love with some gorgeous handpainted roving. Sarah Anderson's "Great Balls of Fiber" BFL Fiesta from her booth at the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival is some of the nicest I've ever seen/touched/sniffed/coveted, etc. It had to come home with me.

My work has always gone in waves. Lately I have been more focussed on knitting and crocheting. My spinning wave had ebbed, and so the roving sat very safely amongst the rest of my stash and UFOs until last weekend. The bug bit me. I had to get my spinning wheel spinning again.

This lovely roving spun up like a dream. The color changes were amazing! I Navajo plied my singles to keep the colors clear, and finished with 255 yards of delicious bulky-weight yarn.

I wanted to make a scarf that would show off those great colors. The Eliza Scarf by LazyKate was a great place to start. Her design is based on fagoting, and shows off the handspun nicely. I made some slight modifications (cast on 19 instead of 14, changed the left edge to match the right, and omitted the flowers). The result was a speedy (done in a few hours) scarf that I can wear with most anything!

Saturday, April 19, 2008

What the Heck??!!

Yesterday I found this!


Today we had this!! (Yes, it's snow!!)


So now I'm going to warm up with some of this!!!


Happy Spring??!?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Gone Thriftin'

I went thrift-store shopping today, and scored big! I had a couple of projects in mind for recycled yarn, but also came home with some things to wear!

These sweaters will be recycled into new items, and perhaps into some yarn for my shop. (The shop has been entirely neglected since Christmas.) Now, if my friends would stop having babies, I might get some things in there for sale!

From top to bottom, these goodies are: an LLBean camel hair/lambswool cardigan, a Nordstrom lambswool pullover, a Woolrich wool/nylon men's pullover, a hand-knit wool (worsted weight) pullover, a Gap lambswool pullover, and Brook's Brothers Shetland wool pullover. Each is just right for future projects.

These two are for me. A Sigrid Olsen Silk cardigan jumped out from the rack. The embroidery, the funky buttons and the texture are all perfect. I will enjoy wearing this one!

I love the spring colors in this crocheted sweater. It has no tags, but I don't believe it was handmade. It has a suspicious-looking seam at the shoulder that is a giveaway. It will be a fun one this season.